Cabrales, Antonio & Esther, Hauk.
The natural-resource curse is now a staple in the development economist’s diet. Natural resources have tended to lead to lower economic growth, except in democratic countries or those with robust institutions. This column presents a political economy model to explain this phenomenon, focusing on the threat of revolutions.
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.
Πηγή: Voxeu