وابستگی به منابع طبیعی و انباشت سرمایه فیزیکی و انسانی در آمریکای لاتین
کد مقاله | سال انتشار | تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی |
---|---|---|
4941 | 2012 | 15 صفحه PDF |
Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)
Journal : Resources Policy, Volume 37, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 281–295
چکیده انگلیسی
In a simultaneous model of human and physical capital accumulation for 17 Latin American countries from 1975 to 2004, we show that overall resource dependence has no significant direct effect on physical and human capital. When disaggregating the natural resource variable into sub-categories, we find that petroleum export dependence has a significant positive direct effect on physical capital, but a significant negative direct effect on human capital. Agricultural export dependence shows a significant negative direct effect on physical capital. Petroleum exports have a long run positive effect on physical capital but a negative long run effect on human capital. Agricultural exports have a negative long run effect on physical and human capital.
مقدمه انگلیسی
The resource curse, where an abundance of natural wealth ends up being a curse rather than a blessing to a country, is a well-known paradox in the development literature. It is a paradox because resource abundance was once considered a key to economic growth and development. The industrial revolution in England was thought to have been driven by the country's large deposits of coal, while the rise of the U.S. economy was at least partly based on its abundance of natural resources. Modern day examples of the curse abound, however. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Nigeria are just a few developing countries that are rich in sub-soil wealth and poor in almost every other development indicator. In fact, if we were to construct a matrix of natural resources and wealth, we would find that no box would be empty of examples. While there are plenty of resource-rich countries which grew quickly, there are also countries like Japan, which grew extremely quickly in the post-WWII period with few natural resources. There are also countries like Somalia, which is resource poor and has had little economic growth. Thus, the anecdotal evidence suggests that the relationship between resources and development is far from clear-cut. While most of the research on the resource curse has focused on economic growth, there are an increasing number of papers that study the effect of resource dependence on factor accumulation. Since capital is a determinant of economic growth, lower capital accumulation would also mean lower average growth rates. In this paper, we investigate the effect of natural resource dependence on human and physical capital accumulation in a panel of 17 Latin American countries between 1975–2004, a region known for its resource abundance as well as its resource dependence.2 Even after more than 50 years of diversification away from primary goods, 68% of Latin America's total merchandise exports in 2000–2004 still consisted of natural resources.3 Our work contributes to the literature on the natural resource curse in five ways. First, we focus on resource dependence (or more specifically, export-dependence on resources) rather than resource abundance.4 Some resource-rich countries (like the U.S.) do not rely much on primary commodity exports, while other resource-rich countries (especially oil-exporters) depend heavily on primary commodity exports. Second, we disaggregate the data on natural resources to determine if different resource types have different effects on capital accumulation.5 Mining and petroleum extraction, for example, are often very capital-intensive processes, which means that countries that rely heavily on these activities may have higher than average levels of physical capital. On the other hand, agricultural production tends to be not as capital intensive as other sectors, such as manufacturing. Third, while much of the literature has either focused on individual countries or large-N cross-sections or panels, we concentrate on a single region. In any empirical estimation, we ideally would like a sample where (1) all the observations come from the same data generating process, and (2) there is sufficient variation in the explanatory variables that we are able to accurately estimate their effects. Limiting the sample to a single region, and one that has shared a common colonial background (or similar background in the case of Brazil) increases the possibility that the observations come from the same data generating process.6 While large samples increase the risk of inappropriately pooling data from heterogeneous countries, focusing on a small sample of countries brings its own risks; namely, that there is no interesting variation to investigate. Fortunately, Latin America has enough variability in resource dependence to make the region an appropriate laboratory for our purposes.7 Besides overall variation in natural resources, there is also variation in the different types of resources.8 Fourth, as noted above, we investigate the relationship between natural resources and physical and human capital accumulation and not on economic growth per se. Growth regressions that include education, investment, and natural resources as right hand side variables imply that resources do not affect growth via human or physical capital accumulation. In these specifications, resource intensity only raises growth through its effect on total factor productivity. There is both theoretical and empirical evidences that resources affect human and physical capital, however, which means that augmented Solow regressions that include resource dependence as an independent variable are unlikely to fully capture the effect of resources. Lastly, Grier (2002) shows that there are important spillover effects between human and physical capital accumulation in Latin America. Investigating the effect of resource dependence on human or physical capital by itself will not reveal the true overall effect because we are not controlling for these spillovers. We confirm Grier's (2002) result that human and physical capital are significantly related to one another in Latin America and show that the effect of human capital on physical capital is large and economically important. In our baseline model, an increase in human capital of 1% is associated with an increase of physical capital of 1.8%. The magnitude of the effect of physical capital on human capital is smaller, where a 1% increase on physical capital is associated with an increase in human capital of 0.23%. For this reason, we study resource dependence in a simultaneous model of physical and human capital. We find little evidence that overall resource dependence has a direct and statistically significant effect on human and physical capital accumulation in the region. 9 In fact, we find that the long run effect of total primary commodity exports has a positive quantitative effect on the accumulation of both human and physical capital.10 We go on to disaggregate natural resources into three groups (petroleum, mineral, and agricultural) and find several interesting results. Petroleum exports are associated with higher levels of physical capital and lower levels of human capital. The long run effect of petroleum exports is similar in that they positively affect physical capital and negatively impact human capital. We also show that Latin American countries that export a large percentage of agricultural goods have lower levels of physical capital on average and that mining exports are never significantly related to either physical or human capital accumulation. The long run effect of agricultural exports on physical capital is quantitatively important. A one percent increase in agricultural export intensity is associated with a 0.20% decrease in physical capital.
نتیجه گیری انگلیسی
We find novel results about the impact of natural resource wealth on factor accumulation in a sample of Latin American countries. Using as our measure of resource dependence total commodity exports as a percentage of GDP, we find no evidence of a statistically significant relationship between resource dependence and capital.71 In addition, we demonstrate that not all resources affect capital in the same way. We find that it is petroleum, and not mineral, exports that have a significant effect on capital accumulation. This is an important distinction since several of the countries in the region are large petroleum exporters. Further, we find that the effect of agricultural dependence on capital accumulation is very different than the effect of petroleum dependence. Another important finding from this analysis is that there is a strong support for the endogeneity of human and physical capital. Thus, it is important to consider the long run effect that natural resource dependence has on capital accumulation. We find that when using total commodity exports, resource dependence has a positive long run effect on both forms of capital. On the other hand, when we use disaggregated commodities, we find that agricultural exports have a negative long run effect on human and physical capital. For petroleum exports, we find that the long run effect on physical capital is positive, but negative for human capital. From this we conclude that the effect of natural resources on capital accumulation varies across different types of commodities, and that the direct effects are different from the long run effects. Therefore, when studying the impact of natural resources in the economy it is important to make a distinction between the different types of resources as well as possible spillover effects that might be involved. While the effect of agricultural exports on capital accumulation is not always robust (significant in 5 out of 6 cases), we find some evidence that countries that rely heavily on agricultural exports have less physical capital accumulation than other countries. We believe that this finding deserves further research. The effect of agricultural production on capital might be partly determined by the degree of land concentration, where the impact of plantation agriculture on capital accumulation may differ from the effect of smallholder agriculture. The type of technology used in agricultural production and the geographic characteristics of the land might also explain the impact of agricultural dependence on capital accumulation. In addition, while our results illuminate the relationship between natural resources and capital accumulation for the Latin American area, further work could extend these results by investigating the relationship in other regions. The results here may not be easily generalized, as the effect of natural resources on economic development is likely to vary across regions.