The curse of natural resources

This paper summarizes and extends previous research that has shown evidence of a "curse of natural resources" - countries with great natural resource wealth tend nevertheless to grow more slowly than resource-poor countries. This result is not easily explained by other variables, or by alternative w ays to measure resource abundance. This paper shows that there is little di rect evidence that omitted geographical or climate variables explain the cu rse, or that there is a bias resulting from some other unobserved growth de terrent. Resource-abundant countries tended to be high-price economies and, perhaps as a consequence, these countries tended to miss-out on export-led growth. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.