Unbundling the Resource Curse

This paper decomposes the resource curse and its potential reversal in three important dimensions; type of resource, type of institutional measure, and time. Studying components of primary exports we find that the curse is (to various degrees) present for all components but that its possible reversal is mainly driven by the interaction between institutions and ores and metals. With respect to institutional measures results are similar for outcome based measures and more durable rules. Changing sample starting dates gives qualitatively similar results, despite the fact that there is great variability in the importance of resources over time. Finally, we address the issue of institutions being determined by our resource measures and conclude that some resources certainly seem to influence institutional development, but that this is unlikely to drive our results. Our results also hold when instrumenting institutional quality.