Natural resources and human development: Role of ICT in testing the resource-curse hypothesis in N11 and BRICS countries

Abstract

Resource-based countries, such as the Next Eleven (N11) and BRICS countries, have been plagued by economic vulnerability due to due to their heavy dependence on the resource industry. Information communication technologies (ICT) has been innovatively applied in the environmental field, which has a potential to break the resource curse. Previous studies have not systematically investigated impacts of ICT on resource curse in both N11 and BRICS nations. This study explores impacts of ICT development on natural resource rents, analyzes the hypothesis of resource curse from the perspective of human development, and determines whether the development of ICT can delay or even avoid the resource curse in N11 and BRICS countries from 2002 to 2019 based on a panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and a quantile regression model. Results show that there is heterogeneity in the impact of resource dependence on the human development index (HDI) in the N11 and BRICS countries across quantiles. A resource curse exists in N11 countries while a resource blessing occurs in BRICS countries. ICT development mitigated the negative impact of natural resource rents on HDI in N11 countries but enhanced positive impacts of natural resource rents on HDI in BRICS countries. This paper provides insights for resource-based countries to break resource curse and formulate short- and long-term natural resource endowment strategies for national sustainable development.