In his influential and highly readable book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims that human-induced ecological and environmental degradation and the over-use of natural resources have caused civilizations to collapse. The term ‘collapse’ means “… a drastic decrease in human population size,...

In his influential and highly readable book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims that human-induced ecological and environmental degradation and the over-use of natural resources have caused civilizations to collapse. This paper examines the collapse thesis in light of recent research on the way...

The negative correlation between resource endowments and GDP growth remains one of the most robust findings in the empirical growth literature, and has been coined the “resource curse hypothesis”. The policy consequences of this result are potentially far reaching. If natural resources are...