This paper takes stock of the economic performance of resource rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past forty years. While those countries have maintained high levels of income per capita, they have performed poorly when going beyond the assessment based on...

Some natural resources-oil and minerals in particular-exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste and...

We criticize existing empirical results on the detrimental effects of natural resource dependence on the rate of economic growth after controlling for institutional quality, openness, and initial income. These results do not survive once we use instrumental variables techniques to correct for...

This paper fills a gap in the macroeconomic literature on renewable sources of energy. It offers a definition of green investment and analyzes the trends and determinants of this investment over the last decade for 35 advanced and emerging countries. We use a new multi-country historical dataset...

This paper explores the extent to which macroprudential tools can be used to manage banking sector risks in Mongolia, a commodity producing country exposed to both procyclical and cross-sectional financial sector risks. Loose fiscal policy, rising credit activity, and heightened risk...

To investigate the effects on Papua New Guinea’s economy of substantial liquified natural gas revenues arriving in 2015, we employ a model to examine the macroeconomic effects of a scalingup of natural resource windfall revenues and the implications for a variety of policy responses. The model...

The benefits from financial development are known to vary across industries. However, no systematic effort has been made to determine the technological characteristics that are shared by industries that tend to grow relatively faster in more financially developed countries. This paper explores a...

This paper presents a model to determine the tax effort and tax capacity of 113 countries and the main variables on which they depend. The results and the model allow a clear determination of which countries are near their tax capacity and which are some way from it, and therefore, could...

High natural resource prices in recent years have resulted in sizeable increases in fiscal revenue for many resource-exporting countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, this revenue source is volatile, and arguably these countries should also rely on other forms of taxation to help fund public...

This paper examines the effect of stabilization funds on the volatility of government expenditure in resource-rich countries. Using a panel data set of 68 resource-rich countries over 1988–2012, the results find that the existence of stabilization funds contributes to smoothing government...