Nature, Power, and Growth

By Thorvaldur Gylfason. Social Science Research Network, 2001

240 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education, rent seeking, and economic policy failures. Across a large number of countries in the period from 1965 to 1998, the share of the primary sector in the labour force is shown to be inversely related to exports, domestic and foreign investment, and education, and directly related to external debt, import protection, corruption, and income inequality. The cross-sectional data show, moreover, that the share of the primary sector in the labour force is inversely related to per capita growth across countries. None of this lies in the nature of things, however. What seems to matter for economic growth is not the abundance of natural resources per se, but rather the quality of their management, and of economic management and institutions in general.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea84bc29cecaf9a0824902cc858ebac9bc2197e0

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Citations in the corpus

Escaping the Resource Curse and the Dutch Disease? When and Why Norway Caught up with and Forged ahead of Its Neighbors (2006, background): “Many authors, e.g. Auty (2001a), Gylfason (2001a), Sachs and Warner, Stevens, and Torvik (2002) point toward rent seeking and corruption as core elements of what causes the curse.”
Natural Resources and Economic Growth: From Dependence to Diversification (2004, background): “Even so, other measures of education such as primaryenrolment rates, tertiary-enrolment rates, public expenditures on education, and years of schooling for girls or boys yield similar results (Gylfason, 2001).”
Measuring and explaining government efficiency in developing countries (2007, background): “Also included is a measure of natural resources, as Gylfason (2001) argues abundant natural resources lead to the neglect of education (the primary sector has less stringent educational demands), rent seeking and economic policy failures.”
Does the 'Resource Curse' Hold for Growth in Genuine Income as Well? (2004, background): “More important, resource abundance might lead to a rentier economy with a predatory state: corruption, political conflict and inequalities are rampant, economic institutions are poorly developed, human capital accumulation, entrepeneurship and innovative activity are crowded out and policy makers ar”
How Important is Oil in Nigeria’s Economic Growth? (2012, background): “Some other reasons why resource-rich countries might suffer resource curse are reduced returns to human investments, precipitated by natural resource exploitation (Gylfason, 2001a; b) and poor economic management that leads to inefficient resource allocation (Rosser, 2006).”
Vulnerable and exploitable: The need for organisational accountability and transparency in emerging and less developed economies (2013, background): “…to suggest that resource-rich developing countries have lower per capita income (Auty, 2007), “lower growth rates, lower levels of human development, and more inequality and poverty (Bulte, Damania, & Deacon, 2005; Gylfason, 2001; Sachs & Warner, 1995)” (Kolstad, Wiig, & Williams, 2009, p. 954).”
Natural Resources and Economic Growth: What is the Connection? (2001, background): “Even so, other measures of education such as primaryenrolment rates, tertiary-enrolment rates, public expenditures on education, and years of schooling for girls or boys yield similar results (Gylfason, 2001).”
Consequences and causes of corruption: What do we know from a cross-section of countries? (2005, background): “Another study by Gylfason [2001] argues that the abundance of natural resources can be measured by the proportion of the labor force employed in primary production.”
The resource curse hypothesis and its transmission channels (2004, background): “…characterized by increasing returns to scale and positive externalities, a decrease in scale of manufacturing decreases the productivity and profitability of investment, which accelerates further the decrease in investment(Sachs and Warner, 1995, 1999a; Gillis et al., 1996; Gylfason, 2000, 2001a).”