Do Natural Resources Inhibit Transparency?

Hamid Mohtadi (), Michael Ross and Stefan Ruediger

No 906, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: Using a new dataset on transparency across 177 countries from 1970 to 2010 and new data on oil values that is measured independently of countries’ reporting mechanisms, we examine whether the presence of income derived from the extraction of oil and other mineral resources induces governance institutions to become less transparent. The new transparency data permits panel estimates that were not previously feasible, while the new oil data addresses an endogeneity problem otherwise inherent in countries’ own reporting of data to the World Bank, thus a major improvement over WDI data. Our results confirm the previous findings that the presence of oil adversely influences transparency, but contradict findings on mineral resources. Transparency is measured by the frequency and extent of data that countries report to international agencies. Our findings suggest that transparency is robustly and adversely linked to income from oil, but not other mineral resources. Conducting “era regressions,” we shed some light on the evolution of this effect across decades.

Pages: 37
Date: 2015-04, Revised 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/906.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/906.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/906.pdf)
http://bit.ly/2lJ6PVv (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:906

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().