Addressing the natural resource curse: An illustration from Nigeria

Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Some natural resources—oil and minerals in particular—exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste and corruption from oil rather than Dutch disease has been responsible for its poor long run economic performance. We propose a solution for addressing this resource curse which involves directly distributing the oil revenues to the public. Even with all the difficulties of corruption and inefficiency that will no doubt plague its actual implementation, our proposal will, at the least, be vastly superior to the status quo. At best, however, it could fundamentally improve the quality of public institutions and, as a result, transform economics and politics in Nigeria.

Keywords: Natural resources; oil; Nigeria; institutions; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 O4 O5 O55 O57 Q0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (568)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/685.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria (2013)
Chapter: Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria (2008)
Working Paper: Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration From Nigeria (2003)
Working Paper: Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria (2003)
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:upf:upfgen:685

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (william.carlson@upf.edu this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).