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Original Articles

A curse or a blessing? Natural resources in a multiple growth regimes analysis

Pages 3760-3769
Published online: 02 Nov 2012

The literature on the impact of an abundance of natural resources on economic performance remains inconclusive. In this article we consider the possibility that countries may follow different growth regimes, and test the hypothesis that whether natural resources are a curse or a blessing depends on the growth regime to which an economy belongs. We follow recent work that has used a mixture-of-regressions method to identify different growth regimes, and find two regimes such that in one regime resources have a positive impact on growth, while in the other they have a negative impact or at best have no impact on growth. Our analysis of the determinants of whether a country belongs or not to the blessed resources regime indicates that the level of democracy plays an important role while education and economic institutions have no effect.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Emmanuel Flachaire and Cecilia Garcia García-Peñalosa for helpful suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank Theo Eicher, Fabian Gouret and Michel Lubrano, as well as the participants at the European Doctoral Group in Economics, Bocconi, 2011, the Association of Southern European Economic Theorists, Evora, 2011 and the Royal Economic Society Conference, Cambridge, 2012. This work was partly supported by the French National Research Agency Grant ANR-08-BLAN-0245-01.

 

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