Curse or Blessing? An Empirical Re-examination of Natural Resource-Growth Nexus

Abstract

This study re-examines the natural resource abundance-growth nexus for a large sample of countries. Our findings indicate that total resource, coal, mineral, natural gas and oil rents have significantly positive effects on growth while forest rents have negative effects. While estimation results show that coal and mineral rents raise growth for resource poor countries, natural gas and oil rents (forest rents) raise (lower) growth for resource-rich countries. Overall, our results fail to support the natural resource curse hypothesis. On the contrary, we can conclude that, except for forest rents, resource rents appear to be a blessing rather than a curse. Copyright (c) 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.