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Our goal is to show that contrary to the claims made in several recent papers, the effect of a large endowment of oil and other mineral resources on long-term economic growth of countries has been on balance positive. Moreover, the claims of a negative effect of oil and mineral wealth on the countries' institutions are called into question. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models: (1) the econometric modeling of the translog cost function, and (2) the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). While there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data, this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data. The translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant, whereas the DEA results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence, in turn suggesting that the translog model may be `averaging' diametrically opposite behavior. On the other hand, by examining the rate of output transformation, both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly. In addition, we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods. The DEA estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization, but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates. This comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach, and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data.organizational studies, data envelopment analysis, hospital costs, efficiency evaluation, production functions, translog estimation, returns to scale

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Using crosscountry regressions, we examine the relationship between "point-source" resource abundance and economic growth, quality of institutions, investment in human and physical capital, and social welfare (life expectancy and infant mortality). Contrary to most literature, we find little evidence of natural resource curse outside of the economies in transition. In the economies in transition, there is some evidence that natural resource wealth is associated with higher infant mortality. This negative effect, however, exists only relative to other resource rich countries. Compared to other economies in transition, natural resource abundant transitional economies are not worse off with respect to our indicators.