Abstract
Over the past few decades, the wealth of Africa has not made African wealthy. There is a voicing that Africa is cursed, whether richly poor or poorly rich. Sub-Saharan Africa is commonplace for political turbulence, as well as humanitarian and economic misery. In such a catastrophic situa-tion, political economics studies have focused on the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Con-flict Resources in this area. A systematic scientometric analysis of this field would be beneficial but is currently lacking in the academic literature. Using VOSviewer and CiteSpace, this review fills the void by analyzing the 1783 articles published in the WoS SSCI Collection between 1993 and 2020 on the “Resource Curses”, “Dutch Diseases”, and “Conflict Resources”. The author dis-cusses recent papers with disruptive potential, references with the most robust citation explora-tions, and cooperation networks between authors and institutes. Three hotspots were detected: the causes and effects of the Resource curses; the interaction among the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources; the factors that affect rent collection and regime resilience. While the literature on the “Resource curse” and “Dutch Disease” has been around longer, studies on “Conflict Resources” are picking up quickly. Conflict Resources were characterized by active citation exploration keywords and multiple active co-citation clusters, including possibly groundbreaking articles. There is a massive overlap between the three strings of literature, but each one has its emphasis.
Highlights
The research on how natural resources affect economic development is fascinating and interesting in political economics studies
All seem to have an interesting reason for this unfortunate occurrence, including the Resource Curse, Dutch Disease, overwhelming corruption, inefficient political processes, mechanisms of injustice, selfish multinationals, shady local and external elites, inefficient or inadequate international aid agencies, outside military and imperial influences, and the emergence of a modern form of colonization led by actors such as China and Israel [9–16]
This review provides a scientometric analysis of the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources studies from 1993 to 2020, as well as the historical research accomplishments in this field, possibly presenting guidelines for decision-makers through institutes, industries, and scholars in coping with the emerging unpredictable African political unrest
Summary
The research on how natural resources affect economic development is fascinating and interesting in political economics studies. All seem to have an interesting reason for this unfortunate occurrence, including the Resource Curse, Dutch Disease, overwhelming corruption, inefficient political processes, mechanisms of injustice, selfish multinationals, shady local and external elites, inefficient or inadequate international aid agencies, outside military and imperial influences, and the emergence of a modern form of colonization led by actors such as China and Israel [9–16]. This review provides a scientometric analysis of the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources studies from 1993 to 2020, as well as the historical research accomplishments in this field, possibly presenting guidelines for decision-makers through institutes, industries, and scholars in coping with the emerging unpredictable African political unrest. Limitations of the results and conclusions are addressed and discussed in Sections 6 and 7
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