Developing countries frequently face large adverse shocks to their economies. We study two distinct types of such shocks: large declines in the price of a country’s commodity exports and severe natural disasters. Unsurprisingly, adverse shocks reduce the short-term growth of constant-price GDP...

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...