ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of oil resources endowment, measured by proven reserves and oil rents, on the economic growth in the presence of quality of governance factors. To address this issue, we first summarize the previous research by reviewing, from the economic literature, the main explanations of what many regard as ‘curse’ of petroleum resource and, in a larger context, evoke the different relationships between natural resources and economic growth. Then, a panel data econometric model is fitted to a dataset consisting of 40 countries and sampled over a period of 17 years. The empirical results confirm, on one hand, the main hypothesis that proven oil resources negatively explain the economic growth. On the other hand, it is shown that oils rents are slightly positively correlated to the economic growth. The manipulation of the set of explanatory variables in the model does not change this overall negative correlation between growth and petroleum endowment, thus proving the counter-intuitive assumption that oil wealth limits the opportunities for economic growth. The results also confirm the old hypothesis that natural resources are negatively correlated to the countries’ GDP through the quality of their economic and financial institutions.

摘要

本文研究了在治理因素质量存在的情况下，以探明储量和石油租金衡量的石油资源禀赋对经济增长的影响。为了解决这个问题，我们首先通过回顾经济文献中对许多人认为是石油资源“诅咒”的主要解释来总结先前的研究，并在更大的背景下唤起自然资源与经济增长之间的不同关系. 然后，将面板数据计量经济学模型拟合到由 40 个国家组成的数据集，并在 17 年的时间段内进行采样。实证结果一方面证实了已探明石油资源对经济增长负向解释的主要假设。另一方面，显示石油租金与经济增长略呈正相关。对模型中解释变量集的操纵并没有改变增长与石油禀赋之间的整体负相关关系，从而证明了石油财富限制了经济增长机会的反直觉假设。结果还证实了旧假设，即自然资源通过其经济和金融机构的质量与国家的 GDP 呈负相关。