چکیده:
Natural resources as a source of wealth can increase prosperity or impede economic growth. Empirical studies with different specifications and data are also mixed on whether natural resources are curse or blessing. In fact, the variety of model specifications, measurements, and samples in the empirical literature makes it difficult to generalize the results. In this study, a growth model including natural resources is developed to estimate the effect of natural resource dependency on economic growth, using different measures of natural resources and controlling for the quality of institutions in 149 countries during 1996-2010. The results show that natural resource abundance, proxied by per capita natural wealth, has a positive and significant effect on GDP growth. However, the impact of natural resource dependency on GDP growth depends on the type of natural resources and the quality of institutions. Fuel dependency, for example, can be considered a strong curse, as it has no effect on GDP growth, and agriculture and food dependency a weak curse, as it can increase GDP growth in the presence of good institutional qualities. Results also show that among different indexes used for institutional qualities, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and rule of law are more effective in avoiding the negative effect of resource dependency. The thresholds above which different types of institutional qualities can turn a curse to a blessing are also estimated for different types of natural resource dependency.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In this study, a growth model including natural resources is developed to estimate the effect of natural resource dependency on economic growth, using different measures of natural resources and controlling for the quality of institutions in 149 countries during 1996-2010.
Furthermore, considering that different institutions may influence the relationship between resource dependency and economic growth differently, the institutional quality index is disaggregated into six components: Voice and Accountability (VA), Political Stability and Absence of Violence (PSAV), Government Effectiveness (GE), Regulatory Quality (RQ), Rule of Law (RL), and Control of Corruption (CC).
Specifically, natural resources have a positive effect on economic growth if institutional quality is good and supports productive economic activities.
Sachs and Warner (1995) show that although natural resources have a negative effect on growth, there is no significant relationship between institutional qualities and resource abundance.
With a more specific definition of institution qualities, Collier and Hoeffler (2009) argue that the combination of democracy and natural resources in developing countries leads to a low level of growth while the interaction between natural resources and check and balance has a positive impact on growth.
In a recent paper, Moshiri (2015) tests if oil shocks have asymmetric effect on economic growth in oil-exporting countries and shows how the effect depends on the institutional quality.
Resource dependency indicator (TOTEX (RD)) shows a negative but insignificant impact on GDP growth, which is consistent with previous work such as Sachs and Warner (1995) and Mehlum et al.
First, the improvement in institutional quality on GDP growth is more pronounced in countries with higher natural resource dependency.