Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing?
综述了自然资源是带来经济增长还是阻碍发展的各种假说与证据，包括资源繁荣导致汇率升值、去工业化、腐败和冲突等负面效应，并探讨了制度质量、政治体制和金融发展等条件如何影响结果。
Are natural resources a “curse” or a “blessing”? The empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible. This paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate, deindustrialization, and bad growth prospects, and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law, corruption, presidential democracies, and underdeveloped financial systems. Another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad, induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries, and keeps in place bad policies. Finally, resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets. The survey also offers some welfare-based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies.