Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth

Jeffrey Sachs () and Andrew Warner
Additional contact information
Jeffrey Sachs: Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Andrew Warner: International Monetary Fund, 700 19th Street NW, Washington, DC 20431

No 802, CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics

Abstract: One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies with abundant natural resources have tended to grow less rapidly than natural resource-scarce economies. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1971 (the base year) tended to have low growth rates during the subsequent period 1971-89. This negative relationship holds true even after controlling for variables found to be important for economic growth, such as initial per capita income, trade policy, govern ment effciency, investment rates, and other variables. We explore the possible pathways for this negative relationship by studying the cross-country effects of resource endowments on trade policy, bureaucratic effciency, and other deter minants of growth. We also provide a simple theoretical model of endogenous growth that might help to explain the observed negative relationship.

Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2025-11-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://down.aefweb.net/WorkingPapers/w802.pdf (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:cuf:wpaper:802

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Qiang Gao ().