Recent literature shows that oil revenues may have a positive effect on long-run economic growth. However, there is no clear evidence for such an effect in the medium-run, suggesting the existence of a so-called resource-curse in the medium-run. Taking this as a starting point, we investigate...

Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...