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...

We provide cross-country evidence that rejects the traditional interpretation of the natural resource curse. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income, investment, human capital, trade openness, natural resource dependence, and...

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...

We critically evaluate the empirical basis for the so-called resource curse and find that, despite the topic's popularity in economics and political science research, this apparent paradox is a red herring. The most commonly used measure of 'resource abundance' can be more usefully interpreted...

Since Sachs and Warner's (1995a) contribution, there has been a lively debate on the so-called natural resource curse. This paper re-examines the effects of natural resource abundance on economic growth using new measures of resource endowment and considering the role of institutional quality....

Because excessive specialization can be risky, diversification matters for sustainable development. A case study of Madagascar, this paper begins by briefly discussing economic and institutional diversification and presenting a simple model of production possibilities to illuminate the possible...

The hypothesis of the natural resource curse has captivated the economics profession, and since the mid-1990s has generated a large body of policymaking initiatives aimed at dispelling the curse. In this paper, we evaluate how the effect of resource abundance on economic growth has changed since...

We examine the effect of natural resource abundance on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to institutional development, liberalization and...

We examine the effect of natural resource exports on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to social and institutional context; however, these...

We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea's structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find...