Are natural resources a "curse" or a "blessing"? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

Many countries have failed to use natural resource wealth to promote growth and development. They have been damaged by the volatility of revenues and have failed to save a sufficiently high proportion of their resource revenues and failed to make high-return investments to support...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...

A new and extensive panel of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) at the sector level is used to estimate the determinants of non-resource and resource FDI. Since FDI is I(1), we estimate panel error correction models of FDI with spatial lags for FDI and market potential. Our main result is...