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The Economics Of Natural Resources And Decentralization, Benard Akalbeo

AYSPS Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three essays on natural resources and decentralization. The first chapter of the dissertation estimates the causal impact of natural resources on economic growth and job creation or unemployment reduction in Ghana. There is a dearth of research on the impact of natural resources in developing countries because of the unavailability or the prohibitively costly nature of data acquisition in those countries. These hurdles present methodological challenges to conducting research in this area. We use an innovative approach – the synthetic control method for comparative case studies to circumvent these challenges. We exploit the quasi-experimental nature of the …