This paper studies the legal institutions set up by communities in the Italian Alps in the 13th – 19th century to manage their common pastures and forests. Over time, private-order institutions in the form of charters replaced informal arrangements sustained by the long-run interaction among...

This article re-examines the relationship between economic growth of the North and that of the South. It considers the implications of this relationship for two major issues within the current North-South debate: basic needs and exhaustible resources. The connections between international trade...

This study aims at unveiling regional development differences in Norway with respect to various natural resource-based activities that take place in the NUTS 3 regions. Norway's natural riches range from agricultural and forest resources to fisheries, mines, petroleum and gas. Considering the...

The Theory of the Second Best implies that any country with less-than-ideal resources can lose from international trade. Recently it has been suggested this means the South (poor countries) are better off suppressing trade with the North, especially trade in natural resource products, since the...

This paper compares two alternative growth paths, assessing the effects on productivity of specialisation in natural resources (NR) and in technologically advanced products. The empirical analysis exploits product-level export data for 109 developing and 51 developed economies over the period...

The term fiscal resource curse refers to countries' inability to raise taxes from a broad base in the presence of natural resources. We employ a novel instrumental variable strategy to estimate the causal effect of resource revenues on non-resource tax effort by exploiting the so-called 'China...

We study whether the spatial distribution of natural resources across different ethnic groups within countries impede spatial inequality, national economic performance, and the incidence of armed conflict. By providing a theoretical rent-seeking model and analysing a set of geocoded data for...