Poor institutions, rich mines: resource curse and the origins of the Sicilian mafia
By P. Buonanno, Ruben Durante, G. Prarolo, Paolo Vanin. 2012
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe lack of state property-right enforcement in response to the rising demand for the protection of sulfur - Sicily's most valuable export commodity - whose demand in the international markets was soaring at the time. We test this hypothesis combining data on the early presence of the mafia and on the distribution of sulfur reserves across Sicilian municipalities and find evidence of a positive and significant effect of sulphur availability on mafia's diffusion. These results remain unchanged when including department fixed-effects and various geographical and historical controls, when controlling for spatial correlation, and when comparing pairs of neighboring municipalities with and without sulfur.
Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df5aa02add4f968f5190df8b644e39ca9911fa60
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Citations in the corpus
- Organized crime and business subsidies: Where does the money go? (2015, background): “Skaperdas (2001) formalizes this idea, while Bandiera (2003) empirically supports it by showing that the mafia was more likely to be active in towns where land was more divided; Buonanno et al. (2012) document that areas characterized by sulphur availability were also more affected by the mafia.”
- Weak States: Causes and Consequences of the Sicilian Mafia (2019, unknown): “…addition includes various determinants of the presence of the Mafia: sulfur production in 1868-70 (emphasized by Del Monte and Pennacchio (2012) and Buonanno et al. (2015)), citrus groves in 1830s (emphasized by Dimico et al. (2017)), olives and vineyards (discussed by Bandiera (2003)), and…”