The Natural Resource Curse, Fiscal Decentralization, and Agglomeration Economies

Ohad Raveh

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Natural resource abundance is a blessing for some countries, yet is a curse for others. The degree of fiscal decentralization may account for this divergent outcome. Resources tend to locate in remote, non-agglomerated, and sparsely populated areas; a high degree of fiscal decentralization gives a resource abundant region an advantage in the inter-regional tax competition over capital so that it attracts some capital from agglomerated and densely populated regions. Given a sufficiently high agglomeration level, any such movement of capital would bring a loss of output in the agglomerated region that outweighs the sum of gains from resource income and increased output in the remote region – so that aggregate product in the economy drops. This theory is empirically tested -and confirmed- building on Sachs and Warner’s influential works on the resource curse, employing the World Bank’s Fiscal Decentralization Indicators, and taking the United States as a case study.

Keywords: Natural Resources; Economic Growth; Resource Curse; Fiscal Decentralization; Agglomeration Economies; Tax Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 O13 O18 O57 Q33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-geo, nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/29664/1/MPRA_paper_29664.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:29664

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().