Rule of Law and the Resource Curse: Abundance Versus Intensity

Abstract

Cross-country comparisons, Multiple imputation, Resource curse, Resource extraction, Resource stocks, Rule of law,

The extractive industries and development: The resource curse at the micro, meso and macro levels

“…There have been several empirical cross-country analyses (using regression analysis) demonstrating a strong negative correlation between mineral resources and several institutional variables (e.g. for corruption, see Arezki and Brückner, 2011;Leite and Weidmann, 2002, for rule of law, see Kolstad, 2009;Norman, 2009;Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian, 2012; for quality of bureaucracy, see Brunnschweiler andBulte, 2008, Isham et al, 2005; for property rights protection see Baggio and Papyrakis, 2010;Brunnschweiler, 2008, for transparency see Williams, 2011).…”

Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Resource Abundance, Dependence and the Onset of Civil Wars

“…8 It can be argued that resource abundance is a relatively persistent variable. However, to test the robustness of our results, we also use alternative measures of resource abundance, namely per capita estimates of the value of total reserves of fuel and non-fuel minerals (including industrial diamonds) in 1970 from Norman (2009), and the per capita production and reserves of oil from 1960-99 from Humphreys (2005). Both datasets cover a wider range of countries, bringing the sample coverage up to 115 and 118 countries, respectively, albeit at the cost of omitting all non-mineral natural resources from the analysis.…”

“…All our previous results carry through. First-stage results (not shown) (1)- (3) is taken from the World Bank; per capita values of fuel and non-fuel minerals in 1970 in column (4) based on data by Norman (2009); per capita oil production and reserves data in columns (5) and (6), respectively, are from Humphreys (2005). Correctly classified in percent; amount wars predicted correctly out of total and amount falsely predicted wars given in parentheses.…”

A Review on the Resource Curse

“…They found no evidence of adverse growth effects if natural wealth is estimated with the not yet extracted reserves per capita. Norman (2009) and Daniele (2011) also emphasise the distinction of dependence (flows) and abundance (stocks) as they suggest that the resource curse theory is corresponsive with the former, but not with the latter. Essentially, all indices measuring natural wealth proportional to current or past economic activities are likely to be fraught with endogeneity.…”