Winning the oil lottery: the impact of natural resource extraction on growth

Tiago Cavalcanti, Daniel Da Mata and Frederik Toscani

Journal of Economic Growth, 2019, vol. 24, issue 1, No 3, 79-115

Abstract: Abstract This paper provides evidence of the causal impact of oil discoveries on local development. Novel data covering the universe of oil wells drilled in Brazil allow us to exploit a quasi-experiment: Municipalities where oil was discovered constitute the treatment group, while municipalities with drilling but no discovery are the control group. The results show that oil discoveries significantly increase local production and have positive spillovers. Workers relocate from informal, low productivity agriculture to higher value-added activities in formal services, increasing urbanization. The results are consistent with greater local demand for non-tradable services driven by highly paid oil workers.

Keywords: Oil and gas; Economic growth; Local economic development; Structural transformation; O13; O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10887-018-09161-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Winning the Oil Lottery: The Impact of Natural Resource Extraction on Growth (2016)
Working Paper: Winning the Oil Lottery: The Impact of Natural Resource Extraction on Growth (2014)
Working Paper: Winning the Oil Lottery: The Impact of Natural Resource Extraction on Growth (2014)
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:kap:jecgro:v:24:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10887-018-09161-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10887-018-09161-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().