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Marquette University

Natural resources

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Geographical Dimension Of The Development Effects Of Natural Resources, Abdur Chowdhury, Fabrizio Carmignani Aug 2012

The Geographical Dimension Of The Development Effects Of Natural Resources, Abdur Chowdhury, Fabrizio Carmignani

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

We study the contribution of natural resource intensity to long-term development along different dimensions: per-capita income, institutional quality, and education. We allow natural resources to affect these dimensions differently in different regions of the world. The evidence suggests that natural resources are generally a positive driver of development, but in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) their contribution is almost negligible, if not even negative. We explain these cross-regional differences with the fact that in SSA more than anywhere else large resource endowments are combined with a particularly bad disease environment. Some historical evidence and formal econometric results support this hypothesis.


(Wp 2011-09) The Development Effects Of Natural Resources: A Geographical Dimension, Fabrizio Carmignani, Abdur Chowdhury Nov 2011

(Wp 2011-09) The Development Effects Of Natural Resources: A Geographical Dimension, Fabrizio Carmignani, Abdur Chowdhury

Economics Working Papers

Despite the recent growth resurgence, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the poorest region in the world. At the same time, it is a region that heavily relies on natural resources. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the second fact helps explain the first one. The distinctive feature of our study is that we take a geographical perspective and allow the effect of natural resources to differ across regions of the world. Our findings suggest that (i) the effect of natural resource intensity on per-capita income is positive and significant in general, but almost negligible and possibly negative in …