The Oil Curse Michael Ross Pdf Printable Application
Top 36 Oil Producers in 2011, in order from largest. Measures of democracy compared to 1970. Good discussion-I'll throw in my two bits with the so-called 'resource curse' and say that America/USA had no resource curse despite having lots of timber and water power-it helped, did not hurt. Likewise pre-Industrial England had no resource curse despite having the abundance of coal (King Coal) which helped power the Industrial Revolution. The Spanish had no resource curse initially, with the gold/silver influx from the New World, until they kept trying to tame the Dutch. Likewise ancient Athens had no resource curse when they got tribute from other city-states as well as the silver mines of nearby Laurium, until they got imperialistic.
So in a sense both schools are correct: it depends on what you do with the resources as to whether they are a curse or a blessing. I have a feeling something like this is going on:oil/resources are probably uncorrelated with broader economic and social outcomes ( as Floccina hints at), but because we only pay attention to the 'screwed up' countries with oil (or diamonds or whatever) there seems to be a negative correlation.If you select on 'has resources' or 'has good institutions' then your resultant data set will show a begative correlation between the two.Thats one possible story, anyway. Victor Menaldo recently delivered a presentation at the ISA annual meeting in San Diego at a panel discussing Ross's book. Menaldo demonstrates that practically every one of Ross's results disappears when appropriate methods are utilized. He argues that weak state capacity is the real culprit, and that there is evidence of an actual resource blessing in a number of countries.
Here is a copy of the Powerpoint he used for his presentation: http://www.plawlotic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Oil-Curse-4.1.12b.pdf. I'm the author of The Oil Curse, so here's my effort to clarify some things:1. The book points out that oil wealth has many repercussions for developing states, some bad (less democracy, more conflict, fewer jobs for women), others good (higher incomes, faster reductions in child mortality). In general, oil makes countries better off economically, but - under many conditions - worse off politically.2. Most of the effects are conditional - that is, the impact of oil depends on a country's initial conditions. Countries that are under authoritarian rule when oil is discovered become much more stable - and hence less likely to transit to democracy - than authoritarian states without oil. But a state that is already democratic and well-governed - Canada, Norway - will generally be unharmed.3.
The Oil Curse Michael Ross Pdf Printable Applications
Stephen Kopits correctly points out that many oil producers are more democratic today than they were in 1970 - but the comparison is misleading, since almost ALL countries in the world are more democratic today than they were in 1970. The question is whether oil has or has not slowed down progress towards democracy. If you compare the oil rich states to the rest of the world, you find they've lagged far behind since the 1970s in moving towards democracy.4. I think Ray Lopez may be right that in the past, natural resource wealth was not a hindrance to democratization or economic development more generally.
The point in my book - which many comments seem to miss, even though it's in Cowen's two-sentence excerpt - is that the oil curse really dates to the 1970s, largely thanks to the wave of nationalizations that swept the oil-producing countries. I don't think this is an especially 'PC' view, and I agree with ThomasH that property rights have much to do with it.5. Victor Menaldo does argue with many of my conclusions - FWIW, he's one of the smarter ones, but not the only one - but I hardly think that he uses 'appropriate methods' and I do not. In fact, the opposite is true - as my coauthor Jorgen Juel Andersen and I show in a new paper:http://home.bi.no/a0810301/AndersenRoss2011.pdf.