Political institutions and the curse of natural resources
Political institutions and the curse of natural resources / Antonio Cabrales & Esther Hauk, VoxEU.org, 17/06/2011
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6656
There is nothing new about the “natural-resource curse”. It is first mentioned in 1993 in a book by Richard Auty titled Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis. The term was then popularised among economists following the influential paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner in 1995. What these authors (and many others) have shown is that countries with greater natural endowments tended to grow more slowly than the rest in the second half of the twentieth century. A related phenomenon is what is called the Dutch disease, a term apparently invented by The Economist to explain the stagnation in the Netherlands as a result of the discovery of a large natural gas field…