The paper examines empirically the proposition that aid to poor countries is detrimental for external competitiveness, giving rise to Dutch disease type effects. At the aggregate level, aid is found to have a positive effect on growth of labour productivity. A sectoral decomposition shows that...

A large body of literature has arisen in economics and political science analyzing the apparent “resource curse”—the tendency of countries with high levels of natural resources to exhibit worse economic and political outcomes. The author examines the purported causal mechanisms underlying...

While natural resource revenues ought to enable development, past experiences with the 'Paradox of Plenty' have shown that mineral and oil wealth often represents a curse rather than a blessing, inducing slower growth and higher levels of poverty. Many resource rich countries have high poverty...

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...

Many studies have found that countries with abundant natural resources grow more slowly than those without a phenomenon often known as the resource curse or the curse of oil. Some development specialists are concerned that foreign aid may also cause a resource curse. Recent research is not...

This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on economic growth using variation in aid inflows from natural disasters. Because using a country's own disaster exposure as an instrument for aid inflows violates exogeneity assumptions, I instead use the disaster exposure of a country's "aid...