In countries where the political-economy incentives that governments face do not foster prudent revenue management, national revenue funds (NRFs) should not be used to impose optimal expenditure paths. In such countries, NRFs should instead be used as policy tools for re-aligning the diverging...

We study the effects of the property tax base shock caused by natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale in Texas–a state that taxes oil and gas wells as property. Over the boom and bust in drilling, housing appreciation closely followed the oil and gas property tax base, which expanded the...

We examine the economic impacts of natural resource revenue-sharing systems, where central governments transfer a portion of resource revenue to producing regions. Using a natural experiment in Indonesia, we separately identify the effects of shared revenue and resource extraction. Contrary to...

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is rich in natural resources, but its economy remains vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices. Endogenous economic diversif ication, a concept aimed at broadening a country’s economic base by utilizing its own resources and capacities, could offer...

We examine the economic impacts of natural resource revenue-sharing systems, where central governments transfer a portion of resource revenue to producing regions. Using a natural experiment in Indonesia, we separately identify the effects of shared revenue and resource extraction. Contrary to...

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...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact of natural resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007). This paper develops a theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality...

Interesting stylized models that discuss the implications of the oil boom or oil export price increase on an oil-rich economy must involve a tension between effects that tend to boost oil sector and harm non-oil sector and effects that vice versa tend to boost non-oil sector and harm oil sector....

In “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999“ Benjamin Smith examines the effects of oil wealth, as well as of sudden changes in oil prices, on regime failure, political protest and civil war. He finds that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes,...

Do reduced costs of factor mobility mitigate ‘Dutch Disease’ symptoms? The case of federations provides an indication for this. By investigating ‘Resource Curse’ effects in all federations for which complete data is available at the regional level it is observed that within federations...