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The “Curse of Resources” Revisited: A Different Story from China

Id：2007 Date：20131014 Status：published ClickTimes：
作者Ying Fang, Li Qi, Yang Zhao
正文Whether natural resources boost or deter economic development remains an open question in the literature. Papyrakis and Gerlagh (2007) found a significant negative association between economic growth and resource abundance at a U.S.-state level. They demonstrated that resource abundance crowds out human capital accumulation and R&D investment. This paper performs an empirical analysis on data from 95 cities in China from 1997 to 2005 and finds no obvious evidence of a significant relationship between natural resources and economic development at the city level. By controlling province dummy variables, however, it becomes clear that resource abundance in one city imposes a significant positive “spill-over” effect on the other cities within the same province. Moreover, an analysis on transmission channels of such spill-over effects reveals that resource abundance boosts the manufacturing industry in the other cities, which is consistent with the “big push” theory.
JEL-Codes：O13, O18
关键词：Curse of resources; Spill-over effects; Big push
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