This paper studies a simple endogenous growth model to explain growth slowdowns. It is designed to explain, for example, the middle income trap often observed in the south-east Asian countries, the U.K.'s productivity puzzle after the Great Recession and the lost decades of Japan in a unified...

Currently, evidence on the ‘resource curse’ yields a conundrum. While there is much cross-section evidence to support the curse hypothesis, time series analyses using vector autoregressive (VAR) models have found that commodity booms raise the growth of commodity exporters. This paper adopts...

We provide cross-country evidence that rejects the traditional interpretation of the natural resource curse. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income, investment, human capital, trade openness, natural resource dependence, and...

Existing studies analyzing the so-called 'resource curse hypothesis' regress growth in gross domestic product (GDP) on some measure of resource-intensity. This is problematic as GDP counts natural and other capital depreciation as income. Deducting depreciation from GDP to arrive at genuine...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the natural resource curse, which refers to a negative link between natural resource abundance and economic growth. It shows empirically that resource-rich countries appear to have a less developed financial system and investigates a potential...

We examine the effect of natural resource abundance on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to institutional development, liberalization and...

We examine the effect of natural resource exports on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to social and institutional context; however, these...