Resource Windfalls Research Articles

One More Resource Curse: Dutch Disease and Export Concentration

Economists have long discussed the negative effect of Dutch disease episodes on the non-resource tradable sector as a whole, but little has been said on its impact on the composition of the non-resource export sector. This paper fills this gap by exploring to what extent concentration of a country’s non-resource export basket is determined by their exports of natural resources. We present a theoretical framework that shows how upward pressure in wages caused by a resource windfall results in higher export concentration. We then document two robust empirical findings consistent with the theory. First, using data on discovery of oil and gas fields and of commodity prices as sources of exogenous variation, we find that countries with larger shares of natural resources in exports have more concentrated non-resource export baskets. Second, we find capital-intensive exports tend to dominate the export basket of countries prone to Dutch disease episodes.

Natural Resource Windfalls and Efficiency in Local Government Expenditure: Evidence from Peru

Natural Resource Windfalls and Efficiency in Local Government Expenditure: Evidence from Peru

Follow the Money: Does the Financial Sector Intermediate Natural Resource Windfalls?

The need to absorb windfalls gains and manage them appropriately has been discussed extensively by academics and policy makers alike. We explore the role of the financial sector in intermediating these windfalls. Controlling for the level of financial development, inflation, GDP growth and country fixed-effects, we find a relative decline in financial sector deposits in countries that experience an unexpected natural resource windfall as measured by shocks to exogenous world prices. Moreover, we find a similar relative decline in lending, which is mostly due to the decrease in deposits. The smaller role for the financial sector in intermediating resource booms is accompanied by a stronger role of governments in channeling resources into the economy, mostly through higher government consumption.

Windfall Wealth and Shale Development in Appalachian Ohio: Preliminary Results

The response by agriculture/natural resources and community development Extension educators to shale development in Ohio has been proactive. There is a need, however, to understand the impact that shale development is having broadly on families and communities and specifically as it relates to lease payments and the perceptions and realities of resource windfalls or sudden wealth. This article presents the preliminary results of a qualitative study. In the course of data analysis, themes emerged around the topics of money, family and community life, and land. A discussion of the role of Extension professionals is provided.

The Nordic Model and the Oil Nation

This paper investigates the long-run economic effects of large natural resource endowments, through a comparative quantitative case study. Focusing on three economic features of the so-called Nordic model, namely low income inequality, high labour productivity growth, and high welfare spending, this study estimates the shocks to these key features in Norway after the country became one of the world'’s largest oil exporters. A synthetic control unit constructed by weighting Nordic countries that resemble the economy of Norway without being oil producers provides the most reliable comparison unit to estimate the causal effects constituting the paper’s threefold contribution. First, results show that the resource windfall contributed to relatively higher top income shares, adding natural resources to the set of drivers of income inequality in Norway. Second, the resource windfall boosted labour productivity. Third, resource revenues contributed to financing the steadily increasing gap between Norway and other Nordic countries in the degree of welfare generosity. Sensitivity tests through in-time placebo tests and difference-in-differences estimations confi rm the validity of these results.

Resource curse avoidance: governmental intervention and wage formation in the Norwegian petroleum sector

A likely channel for Dutch disease turning a presumably blessing resource windfall into a curse, is the wage formation process. By utilizing the shift from decentralized and uncoordinated wage bargaining in the Norwegian petroleum sector to co-ordinated bargaining, this paper analyzes the effectiveness of a governmental intervention aimed at preventing the extraordinary petroleum wage inflation to become detrimental to the economy. The empirical analysis shows that the intervention was successful as insider weights and insider hysteresis effects were effectively reduced, and that the system of coordinated wage bargaining was re-established. The principal conclusion is that institutions and institutional setting play a crucial role in avoiding adverse economic development.

Absorptive Capacity and the Impact of Commodity Terms of Trade Shocks in Resource Export-Dependent Economies

This paper investigates the role of “absorptive capacity” to manage unexpected shocks to their real economy, with a focus on small, open, natural resource-dependent economies. A quarterly panel data series for 45 countries is constructed, including 23 developing Asian countries for empirical investigation. For the entire sample, the analysis finds that absorptive capacity, choice of exchange rate regime, presence of wealth funds, level of foreign reserves, or degree of resource dependency alone, does not matter when real shocks are introduced to output. However, levels of absorptive capacity or ability to use resource windfalls effectively, and foreign reserves begin to matter when the sample is restricted to resource-dependent countries. Case studies from Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste support this claim highlighting the challenges they face with a sudden influx of natural resource revenues when capacity to effectively use fiscal revenues is limited.

The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.

Natural resources, decentralization, and risk sharing: Can resource booms unify nations?

Previous studies imply that a positive regional fiscal shock, such as a resource boom, strengthens the desire for separation. In this paper we present a new and opposite perspective. We construct a model of endogenous fiscal decentralization that builds on two key notions: a trade-off between risk sharing and heterogeneity, and a positive association between resource booms and risk. The model shows that a resource windfall causes the nation to centralize as a mechanism to either share risk and/or prevent local capture, depending on the relative bargaining power of the central and regional governments. We provide cross country empirical evidence for the main hypotheses, finding that resource booms: (i) decrease the level of fiscal decentralization with no U-shaped patterns, (ii) cause the former due to risk sharing incentives primarily when regional governments are relatively strong, and (iii) have no effect on political decentralization.

Fiscal Rules for Resource Windfall Allocation: The Case of Trinidad and Tobago

Managing resource revenues is a critical policy issue for small open resource-rich countries. This paper uses an open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the transmission of resource price shocks and a shock to resource production in the Trinidad and Tobago economy. It also applies alternative fiscal rules to determine the optimal allocation of resource windfalls between spending today and saving in a sovereign wealth fund. The results show that spending all the resource windfall on consumption and investment creates more volatility and amplifies Dutch disease effects, when compared to the case where all the excess revenues are saved. Also, neither a policy of full spending nor full saving of the surplus revenue inflows is optimal if the government is concerned about both household welfare and fiscal stability. In order to minimize deviations from both objectives, the optimal fiscal response suggests that a larger fraction of the resource windfalls should be saved.

Fiscal Rules for Resource Windfall Allocation: The Case of Trinidad and Tobago

Managing resource revenues is a critical policy issue for small open resource-rich countries. This paper uses an open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the transmission of resource price shocks and a shock to resource production in the Trinidad and Tobago economy. It also applies alternative fiscal rules to determine the optimal allocation of resource windfalls between spending today and saving in a sovereign wealth fund. The results show that spending all the resource windfall on consumption and investment creates more volatility and amplifies Dutch disease effects, when compared to the case where all the excess revenues are saved. Also, neither a policy of full spending nor full saving of the surplus revenue inflows is optimal if the government is concerned about both household welfare and fiscal stability. In order to minimize deviations from both objectives, the optimal fiscal response suggests that a larger fraction of the resource windfalls should be saved.

Resource Windfalls and Local Government Behavior: Evidence from a Policy Reform in Indonesia

We analyze the impact of a natural experiment in Indonesia that allocated certain district governments with a windfall revenue from natural resource production. Our identi…cation is based on a comparison between bordering districts in provinces that received the windfall with those that did not receive it, before and after the …scal reform in 1999. We study the impact on a range of outcome variables such as regional GDP, infrastructure quality, employment,

Current account norms in natural resource rich and capital scarce economies

The permanent income hypothesis implies that frictionless open economies with exhaustible natural resources should save abroad most of their resource windfalls and, therefore, feature current account surpluses. Resource rich developing countries (RRDCs), on the other hand, face substantial development needs and tight external borrowing constraints. By relaxing these constraints and providing a key financing source for public investment, resource windfalls might then be associated with current account deficits or at least low surpluses. In this paper, we develop a neoclassical model with private and public investment and several pervasive features in RRDCs, including absorptive capacity constraints, inefficiencies in investment, borrowing constraints, and capital scarcity. We use the model to study the role of investment and these frictions in shaping the current account dynamics under windfalls. Since consumption and investment decisions are optimal, the model also serves to analyze current account norms (benchmarks). We apply the model to the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa and discuss how our results can be used to inform external sustainability analyses in RRDCs.

Understanding the resource curse (or blessing) across national and regional scales: Theory, empirical challenges and an application

The relationship between resource extraction activity and economic growth has been widely studied in the literature, and the resource curse hypotheses emerged as a theory to explain the effects of resource windfalls on national economies. However, within countries, resource booms and busts can have distinctive effects across local economies, as extractive regions face particular economic consequences unlikely to be observed in nonresource regions. Empirically, most studies analysing the resource curse have relied on cross‐country models to estimate effects and inform policy; however, the use of regional – within‐country – analysis has gained attention from scholars lately, promoted by two advantages: it avoids unobserved country heterogeneities confounding economic outcomes caused by resources and exploits the subnational quasi‐natural experimental conditions generated by endowments. This paper contributes to the resource curse literature by discussing its theoretical causes across scale (regional vs. national effects) and highlighting the empirical challenges involved in the analysis of mining economic impacts across regions. We complement the discussions by econometrically modelling economic growth across nonmetropolitan substate regions of Australia during a period of resource windfalls, finding that in most cases, resources have been a blessing for local economies, although negative effects have also been experienced in parts of the country.

Do Resource Windfalls Improve the Standard of Living in Sub-Saharan African Countries?: Evidence from a Panel of Countries

We examine the impact of resource windfall on the standard of living both in the short-run and long-run, using a sample of 130 countries, 1963-2007. Then, we systematically investigate the effect of resource windfall on welfare in three different groups of countries: We find that in the short-run resource windfall is welfare enhancing in the whole sample, especially via increases in income and decreases in inequality. However, in SSA countries, the size of welfare improvement is small and it is smaller and almost zero after one year in fragile Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. In the whole sample, a resource windfall shock leads to significant welfare growth even in the long-run, but we couldn’t find any significant long-run effect of resource windfall in SSA countries.

Do Resource Windfalls Improve the Standard of Living in Sub-Saharan African Countries?: Evidence from a Panel of Countries

We examine the impact of resource windfall on the standard of living both in the short-run and long-run, using a sample of 130 countries, 1963-2007. Then, we systematically investigate the effect of resource windfall on welfare in three different groups of countries: We find that in the short-run resource windfall is welfare enhancing in the whole sample, especially via increases in income and decreases in inequality. However, in SSA countries, the size of welfare improvement is small and it is smaller and almost zero after one year in fragile Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. In the whole sample, a resource windfall shock leads to significant welfare growth even in the long-run, but we couldn’t find any significant long-run effect of resource windfall in SSA countries.

The Tin Frontier: Mining, Empire, and Environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s–1930s

This article investigates the interactions between culture, technology, and environmental change during the tin mining boom in colonial Southeast Asia, the world's dominant tin-producing region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It approaches the explosive growth of the industry—above all in western Malaysia and the “tin isles” of the Netherlands Indies—as a variation on the concept of the commodity frontier: namely, one whose topography comprised not just the surface landscapes over which it expanded but also the various grades and depths of ore beneath them. Like most commodity frontiers, this one presented a series of resource windfalls tapped by successive waves of entrepreneurs producing for a rising international market. But beneath these overarching commonalities, two interrelated factors lent it a distinctive dynamic: first, the central role of new technologies in repeatedly pushing the frontier into new underground strata and types of terrain, and second, the ways in which this three-dimensional expansion was animated by colonial ideologies of nature, race, waste, and industry that were deeply embedded in the project of European imperialism.

How Should Donors Respond to Resource Windfalls in Poor Countries? From Aid to Insurance

Natural resources are being discovered in more countries, both rich and poor. Many of the new and aspiring resource exporters are low-income countries that are still receiving substantial levels of foreign aid. Resource discoveries open up enormous opportunities, but also expose producing countries to huge trade and fiscal shocks from volatile commodity markets if their exports are highly concentrated. A large literature on theresource curseshows that these are damaging unless countries manage to cushion the effects through countercyclical policy. It also shows that the countries least likely to do so successfully are those with weaker institutions, and these are most likely to remain as clients of the aid system. This paper considers the question of how donors should respond to their clients'potential windfalls. It discusses several ways in which the focus and nature of foreign aid programs will need to change, including the level of financial assistance. The paper develops some ideas on how a donor like the International Development Association might structure its program of financial transfers to mitigate volatility. The paper outlines ways in which the International Development Association could use hedging instruments to vary disbursements while still working within a framework of country allocations that are not contingent on oil prices. Simulations suggest that the International Development Association could be structured to provide a larger degree of insurance if it is calibrated to hedge against large declines in resource prices. These suggestions are intended to complement other mechanisms, including self-insurance using Sovereign Wealth Funds (where possible) and the facilities of the International Monetary Fund.

Natural resources and institutional development

Recent work on the resource curse argues that the effect of resource wealth on development outcomes is a conditional one: resource-dependent countries with low-quality institutions are vulnerable to a resource curse, while resource-dependent countries with high-quality institutions are not. But extant models neglect the ways in which the inflow of resource revenue impacts the institutional environment itself. In this paper, I present a formal model to show that where domestic institutions do not limit state leaders’ discretion over policy prior to becoming fiscally reliant on resources, those leaders have little incentive in the wake of resource windfalls to establish institutional mechanisms that limit their discretion. Importantly, this shows that simple calls for domestic institutional reform are unlikely to be effective. Among other things, future prescriptions to mitigate the resource curse must focus on decreasing rulers’ fiscal reliance on resources.

An Empirical Analysis of a Regional Dutch Disease: The Case of Canada

While there has been extensive research on the Dutch Disease (DD), very little attention, if any, has been devoted to the regional mechanisms through which it may manifest itself. This is the first empirical attempt to research a ‘regional DD’ by looking at the local and spatial impacts of resource windfalls across Canadian provinces and territories. We construct a new panel dataset to examine separately the key DD channels; namely, the Spending Effect and the Resource Movement Effect. Our analysis reveals that the standard DD mechanisms are also relevant at the regional level; specifically, we find that: (a) Resource windfalls are associated with higher inflation and a labour (capital) shift from (to) non-primary tradable sectors. (b) Resource windfalls in neighbouring regions are associated with a capital (labour) shift from (to) non-primary tradable sectors in the source region. (c) The (spatial) DD explains (51 %) 20 % of the adverse effects of resource windfalls (in neighbouring regions) on region-specific non-mineral international exports (in the source region), and does not significantly affect domestic ones.