Natural Resources, Institutions, and Economic Development in Africa

Augustin Fosu () and Dede Gafa
Additional contact information
Dede Gafa: African School of Economics (ASE), Abomey-Calavi, Benin; African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), Nairobi, Kenya

No 202314, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper, first, examines the association between resource rents, institutions and economic growth in Africa, as well as the performance of resource-rich and non-resource-rich countries on institutional quality and political governance. The findings suggest that resource rents failed to contribute to long-term growth on the continent. Additionally, higher resource rents are associated with relatively weak institutions. Second, using historical data, the study tests the validity of the resource-curse hypothesis in two resource-rich countries: Nigeria and Botswana. Although both countries have derived substantial revenues from their natural resource sectors, the distributed-lag results show that Nigeria may have experienced a natural-resource curse, while Botswana has not. Based on the extant literature, we argue that the present findings can be attributed to differences in the level of institutional quality between the two countries.

Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2023-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pre:wpaper:202314

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rangan Gupta ().