In 1968, a paper appeared in the Science journal outlining a macroeconomic concept referring to the problem of common use of environmental resources. Its author, Garret Hardin, stated that the natural human desire to maximise individual economic benefits led to overexploitation of environmental...

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them. Hardin’s widely accepted argument seems correct as far as it goes,...

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...

The paper analyses the impact of natural resource abundance on selected governance indicators. In contrast to earlier studies that are mainly confined to cross-sectional analysis, we use a panel data set with a large number of countries and an extended period of time. Moreover, we employ an...

Donor interest in the extractives sector is based upon the premise that it represents an opportunity to improve a country's development prospects. However, in many cases the presence of extractive resources is associated with poor economic performance. As a result, some donors are trying a...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of the mining sector on household expenditures. Employing the difference-in-differences model and the Mongolia Household Socio-Economic Survey data from 2008 to 2016, I find that the mining activities benefited local residents. Specifically, mining...

Natural resources are often related to conflicts. The Dal B'o & Dal B'o (2011) theory states that income shocks affect capital- and labor-intensive sectors differently. Using sub-national cells covering the African continent for 1997-2010, I find that conflicts react differently to positive...

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...

To study the causal impact of oil royalties on human capital, we exploit quasi-experimental variation arising from a law in Ecuador that transfers resources to municipalities regardless of their oil-producing status. We find that royalties increase the likelihood of students completing primary...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effect of natural resource rents on the process of economic liberalization and a potential moderating effect of the level of democracy. A simple political-economic model is developed in which the government in an autocratic country faces...