The BI Business History Seminar

Lars Christian Bruno (BI): “Resource curse in a historical perspective”

This paper explores the resource curse in two different periods, the late 19th and late 20th century. The evidence for the resource curse, the hypothesis that natural resources somehow is detrimental to economic growth, is mainly based on empirical evidence for the late 20th century. However, the late 19th century has seen far less focus. This paper uses a panel data set up to explore the effect of natural resources for those countries for which data is available for both these periods. This paper asks whether natural resources had a different macroeconomic impact over time and analyses the causes for its effect.