The artefact of the Natural Resources Curse

Abstract

This paper reexamines the validity of the natural resource curse hypothesis, using the database of mineral exporting countries. Our findings are as follows: (i) Resource-rich countries (RRCs) do not necessarily exhibit poor political, economic and social performance; (ii) RRCs that perform poorly have a low diversified exports portfolio; (iii) In contrast, RRCs with a low diversified exports portfolio do not necessarily perform poorly. Then, we develop a model of strategic interaction from a Bayesian game setup to study the role of leadership and governance in the management of natural resources. We show that an improvement in the leadership-governance binomial helps to discipline the behavior of lobby groups (theorem 1) and generate a Pareto improvement in the management of natural resources (theorem 2). Evidence from the World Bank Group's CPIA data confirms the later finding. Our results remain valid after some robustness checks.