Does oil abundance harm growth?

Abstract

This article explores whether natural resource abundance is a curse. Our results reveal that oil abundance has a positive effect on both long-run income levels and short-run economic growth.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF). We are grateful to Partha Dasgupta and Hashem Pesaran as well as conference participants at the LACEA-LAMES 2009 for constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) argued that the resource curse does not exist, and that while resource dependence, when instrumented in growth regressions, does not affect growth, resource abundance in fact positively affects economic growth.

²For more details, see Cavalcanti et al. (2009).

³The results for the individual countries are not reported in the article, but they are available upon request.

⁴The results are available upon request.