“…Natural resources and natural resource rents have become important factors that are being used to explain different things in the literature such as economic development (Auty, 2004), stock market development (Billmeier and Massa, 2009), institutions (Mehlum et al 2006) human capital accumulation (Stijns, 2006), governance, conflict and wars (Bannon and Collier, 2003;Collier and Hoeffler, 2005;De Soysa and Neumayer, 2007;Bjorvatn and Farzanegan, 2013;and Farzanegan et al 2018) as well as economic growth in the sense of the resource blessing or curse (Sachs and Warner, 2001;Guetat, 2006;Makdisi et al 2006;Brass, 2008) among many other uses of natural resources and natural resource rents in the economic literature. The World Bank (2019) offers reliable data with regards to natural resource rents and defines them as "Total natural resources rents are the sum of oil rents, natural gas rents, coal rents (hard and soft), mineral rents, and forest rents".…”