Economic development and known natural resource endowment: Discovery rate differentials of oil

Jonas Hamang

Journal of Development Economics, 2024, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: The location of oil reserves plays an essential role in policymakers’ incentives to coordinate supply-side climate policy. In this paper I use data on the location of all historic onshore petroleum discoveries to establish a new stylized fact: Economically developed areas are many times more likely to contain an oil or gas discovery, compared to undeveloped areas. I show that this result is not driven reverse causality or confounding geology. By implication, there exist large additional undiscovered oil and gas deposits in currently undeveloped areas, mainly located outside of Europe and North America. I quantify these deposits to be about 40% of total discovered onshore oil reserves.

Keywords: Oil; Natural resources; Economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824000397
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0304387824000397

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103290

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().