آیا درآمد حاصل از منابع طبیعی مانع توسعه ی اقتصادیست؟نقش نهادهای سیاسی

We hypothesize that natural resource revenues may deteriorate contract enforcement if political institutions are weak. As poor contract enforcement leads to low financial development, resource revenues may hinder financial development in countries with poor political institutions, but not in countries with comparatively better political institutions. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis based on within-country variation in our sample covering the period 1970–2005 and 133 countries. Our results are robust to the use of additional control variables, different samples, and alternative measures of financial development and political institutions.

There is a large literature discussing whether natural resource revenues are a curse or a blessing for economic development (see van der Ploeg, 2011, for a survey). In this paper we focus on the question of whether natural resource revenues are a curse or a blessing for financial development, i.e., for the functioning and size of financial markets and intermediaries.1 The financial sector and especially banks in natural resource-rich countries may be flushed with liquidity originating from tax receipts deposited by governments, or directly deposited by state owned or privately owned companies operating in the resource sector. Therefore, all else being equal, one might expect more bank credits to firms and households, and more developed financial markets in resource-rich countries.

This paper studies whether natural resource revenues hinder financial development, and what role political institutions are playing in this process. High natural resource revenues may act as an adverse incentive for the ruling elite inducing them to neglect contracting enforcement if political institutions are weak. As a result resource-rich countries with weak political institutions are likely to be financially underdeveloped. To test this hypothesis, we use panel data covering the period 1970–2005 and 133 countries. We find that resource rents are negatively associated with financial development in countries with weak political institutions, but this negative effect decreases in absolute value and eventually vanishes as the quality of political institutions improves. Our main results hold when we control for country fixed effects, time varying common shocks, income, and various additional covariates. We are able to show that the effect is a demonstrable empirical fact even after controlling for conventional Dutch Disease effects. It is also robust across different samples as well as to the use of various alternative measures of financial development and political institutions.