Volatility in natural resources, economic performance, and public administration quality: Evidence from COVID-19

Abstract

The recent Covid-19 pandemic outbreak caused a global economic recession and promoted uncertainty in the natural resources. Also, this uncertainty is linked with the demand and supply of natural resources such as oil and natural gas, which is a substantial factor of industrial and economic activities. Declining natural resource demands substantially drop such activities that adversely affect economic performance. This attracts the attention of policy-makers and governors to efficiently tackle the issue. This study investigates the association of natural resources volatility, global economic performance, and public administration in earlier and Covid-19 pandemic peak periods. The study covers the period from 1990 to 2020 for the global data. The empirical findings of the cointegration test suggested that the variables are cointegrated. This study utilizes three long-run estimators, i.e., fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), dynamic OLS (DOLS), and Canonical Cointegrating Regression (CCR). The empirical findings suggest that natural resources volatility (TNR) negatively and significantly affect global economic performance. While natural gas rents, oil rents, and public administration quality (QPA) promote global economic performance. Besides, the results also indicate that the interaction of QPA and TNR enhances economic performance. This study demonstrates that volatility in natural resources is detrimental to global economic performance. However, improved public administrative quality could play a significant role in transforming the negative influence.of natural resources volatility into a positive effect. The findings are robust as validated by Robust regression. This study provides some practical policy insights for the governors and policy-makers to tackle the mentioned issues.