Search

New empirical evidence regarding theories of the resource curse and regional resilience in the context of energy transitions is presented in this article. Our analysis aimed to answer the questions of what the principal differences are between coal mining and other regions in the Czech Republic, and what are the determinants of population decline, unemployment and populism as some of the key indicators of socioeconomic transformation. Unlike most current European studies focusing on NUTS2 or NUTS3 regions, we deal with data for districts (LAU1). The analysis revealed that (in aggregate) coal mining and post-mining districts are worse off in terms of air quality, population vitality, labour market and social capital indicators. It would be problematic for policy implications to consider coal mining and post-mining districts as homogenous categories, however, since there are significant inter-group and intra-group differences in most indicators. Coal mining itself and its decline did not prove to be a direct determinant of population loss, unemployment, and support for populism. The factors significantly affecting these phenomena are geographical (peripherality, urbanisation, population density) and socioeconomic (education level, business activity). In this respect, a provocative question is offered: to what extent is it effective and sustainable to economically support coal mining regions in their existing industrial production structures and population scales, and whether the current processes of reterritorialisation and depopulation can be considered a natural process. The fact that coal mining districts are at the forefront in the implementation of wind energy may be seen as positive, but it raises questions about spatial concentration, and the environmental justice of renewable energy development.

Central Asian States (CAS) have diverse natural resources. This research aims to shed light on the finance–natural resource's association in the context of CAS namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in 1996–2020 using the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag technique. It seeks to examine the research question, "What is the effect of natural resource wealth on the financial expansion (FE) of Central Asia?" The results demonstrated an inverted U-shaped association between financial growth and natural resource rents. It implies that natural resources are initially a "resource blessing" that later becomes a "resource curse." Additionally, the effect of institutional quality (INQ) and human development (HD) on financial growth is examined. The results reveal that INQ and HD positively affect FE. Moreover, a bidirectional causal relationship exists between FE and INQ. Finally, all variables contribute to a long term FE. Based on these outcomes, the major policy recommendations are that the CAS authorities diversify their financial services and products and direct the proceeds from natural resource rents to effective investments particularly in HD. In addition, the social and political infrastructures in CAS must be restructured to achieve a high-quality institutional environment, which is necessary to increase the role of the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the asymmetric impact of oil price fluctuations on non-performing loans (NPLs) between 2009-Q1 and 2020-Q1 for 28 banks in Kazakhstan. Dynamic panel threshold analysis revealed an initial increase of oil prices, improving creditworthiness, thereby reducing NPLs; however, after cross a certain threshold, the relationship was shown to become the opposite. This finding is in line with the Ricardian curse and resource windfall. The results suggest that optimal borrowings and lending should be actively monitored to mitigate potential liquidity problems of banks and consequently NPLs. The practical implications and policy recommendation of which are important to policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study interrogates the impacts of mining at Connemara Gold Mine on the environment and rural livelihoods for surrounding communities the mine. While we acknowledge that mining is a very lucrative business and one of the major drivers of the Zimbabwean economy, we argue that most of the benefits of mining tend to be enjoyed elsewhere and not by host communities. We roped in the Treadmill of Production and the Resource Curse theories to demonstrate the interplay between capitalism, the environment and local ordinary people's livelihoods around Connemara mine. Data were collected through interviews with local community residents, leaders and stakeholder organizations with interests in mining who were selected through purposive and snowballing techniques. We collected data over a period of 13 weeks, interviewing twenty-five respondents in the process and undertaking a series of transect walks across the mined site and its adjacent surroundings. We discovered that mining caused extensive environmental destruction, creating artificial hills and open pits as well as promoting massive soil erosion, contaminating water and land with dangerous chemicals making them unusable for productive purposes. As a result, we conclude that mining at the site did not generate wealth for the local populace but for the mine owners and the state while impoverishing the host communities, destroying their livelihoods in doing so. We conclude by arguing that mining at Connemara is a perfect example of how the Treadmill of Production works and an evident testimony of the Resource Curse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how digital finance alleviates the resource curse effect from resource-based cities in China. This paper selects the data from 88 resource-based cities in China from 2011 to 2019 to construct the econometric model test hypothesis. The results show that (1) a resource curse does exist in Chinese resource-based cities. (2) Digital finance can alleviate the resource curse of resource-based cities in China, and this effect has two significant thresholds. (3) The heterogeneity test results show that digital finance's mitigation effect on the resource curse significantly differs in cities with different environmental regulation intensities and resource abundance. (4) Using the implementation of the broadband China strategy as the proxy variable of digital finance for the robustness test, the above conclusions are still robust. This paper considers the impact of digital upgrading on the financial industry and further studies the mitigation effect of digital finance on the resource curse. It provides a new perspective to study the recent changes in traditional issues in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THe importance of the impact of natural resources on economic growth is an important issue with a long history in the energy and environment literature. It is seen that the studies conducted in this field are generally shaped by the "resource curse hypothesis," a hypothesis that highlights the trade-off between economic growth and resource abundance in the growth literature. However, the extant literature have presented inconclusive results. This study aims to examine the direction of causality between capital, energy use, energy imports, exchange rate, natural resources, and per capita income in countries that are rich in natural resources and consist of developing countries (D-8). In this context, first of all, the existence of CD test was determined, and then the stationarity of the variables was determined with the CADF unit root test. Then, whether the slope coefficients of the variables were homogeneous or not, it was decided that they were heterogeneous. Finally, the direction of causality between the variables was examined with the Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel causality test applied to heterogeneous panels. The empirical analysis results show a unidirectional causal relationship from capital to GDP per capita and from GDP per capita to energy use. In addition, while a two-way causality relationship was determined between the exchange rate and GDP per capita, no causal relationship was found between energy imports, natural resources, and per capita income. These results have macroeconomic implications and spillover effects on the energy mix of D-8 economies. In addition, no causal relationship was found between natural resources and GDP per capita in this country group and within the scope of the analysis period. Policy recommendations are highlighted in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its potential to contribute to mass suffering, economic disruption, and social unrest, climate change poses a security threat to the constitutional identities of states (as democratic, autocratic, or hybrid regimes). This paper proposes a conceptual framework of mediated causality for climatic impacts on constitutional identity and engages in novel theory-building for one mediating vector of change: the post-fossil energy transition. Theories of the "oil curse" and of "carbon democracy" are compared and critiqued for their contributions to understanding the potential impacts of decarbonized energy systems on democracy. Two counterintuitive conclusions emerge. First, transitioning away from petroleum may not result in increased democratization, as the oil curse implies. Second, post-fossil energy systems are unlikely to become structurally decentralized, as advocates of "energy democracy" suppose, and may even need to remain centralized in order for popular mobilization around energy to help maintain or reinvigorate democratic rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits and empirically tests the conjecture that specialization in natural resource industries (NRI) might not necessarily be a 'curse' for developing countries if it generates opportunities for export diversification in backward‐linked sectors à la Hirschman. The article systematizes the evolution of the debate around the NRI 'curse'. Then it empirically tests whether NRI might represent a sufficient 'domestic representative demand' à la Linder to favour diversification into backward‐linked sectors such as knowledge‐intensive business services and high‐tech manufacturing. It focuses on the former and discusses the new opportunities for export diversification led by virtuous pathways of domestic structural change. It finds novel, quantitative empirical support for this conjecture, which complements extant qualitative literature and discusses implications that revisit the NRI curse debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to bridge part of the gap that exists between the resource curse literature and economic historical research on natural resources by analysing four resource-abundant countries. The study proposes that at the sectoral level, the determinants of growth in resource-based industries were mostly similar in the late 19th and late 20th centuries. However, we also argue that the relative contribution of natural resources to economic growth might have been declining during the late twentieth century. The evidence comes from an analysis of the forestry sector in Finland and Sweden between 1860 and 1910 and the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia between 1970 and 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending improve natural resource governance in borrowing countries? While most IMF agreements mandate policy reforms in exchange for financial support, compliance with these reforms is mixed at best. The natural resource sector should be no exception. After all, resource windfalls enable short‐term increases in discretionary spending, and office‐seeking politicians are often unwilling to forgo this discretion by reforming the oil, gas, or mining sector. I investigate how and when borrowers go against their political interests and establish natural resource funds—a tool often promoted by the IMF—in the wake of a loan agreement. Using text analysis, statistical models, and qualitative evidence from natural resource policy and IMF conditionality for 74 countries between 1980 and 2019, I show that borrowers under an IMF agreement are more likely to create or regulate a resource fund, particularly if the agreement includes binding conditions that highlight the salience of natural resource reforms. This study contributes to extant research by proposing a new method to extract information from IMF conditions, by introducing a novel dataset on country‐level natural resource policy, and by identifying under what circumstances international reform efforts can help combat the resource curse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the resource curse literature, this paper examines the effect of oil dependency on the disparities in access to electricity between urban and rural areas in Africa, conditional on the quality of political institutions. Based on data from 36 African countries over the period 2000–2017, our investigation suggests that oil rents (% of GDP) increase urban–rural disparities in access to electricity. However, the quality of institutions shapes the effect of oil dependency on these disparities. Specifically, a 10% increase in the institutional quality score reduces the adverse effects of oil rent on electricity access disparity by around 19%, and the negative impact of oil dependency on urban–rural disparities is reversed when institutional quality reaches a score of 52% on a scale from 0 to 100. The robustness tests support these results and call for strengthening the quality of institutions to overcome the resource curse in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data is collected through laboratory experiments on a dynamic common pool resource game, where, in an infinitely repeated number of rounds (i.e., game ended randomly), individuals made decisions about whether to exert a high or a low effort level to extract resources. Experiments were conducted using the student sample (consent provided and ethics approved) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A total of 8 sessions, 2 for each of the 4 treatments, were run with exactly 20 participants within a session. Individuals made decisions in groups of 10. Communication between any participant was not allowed. A session is randomly assigned (1) to vary whether the inflow of resources at the beginning of each round is high or low, and (2) to allow participants to either financially punish or socially punish defectors. A financial punishment resulted to a loss in profit for the punished while a social punishment displayed the words “You have extracted too much! You're being greedy!” on the computer screen of the punished. Individuals were assigned subject ID numbers and interacted using their subject IDs. The data is useful in understanding how resource inflow and type of punishment affects individual resource extraction behavior. The data could also be combined with other publicly available common pool resource datasets for a meta-analysis on individual behavior in the commons.

This study examines the complex relationship between the energy sector and economic development that poses challenges to sustainable development in resource-producing countries. We investigate the hypothesis that resource-rich developing and underdeveloped nations struggle to maximize the advantages of their crude oil reserves, ultimately experiencing the phenomenon known as the “resource curse”. The paper examines the need for developed countries to formulate new strategies to meet their domestic energy needs. The authors argue that industrialised countries can tap into resources from developing nations, but it is important to ensure that these nations benefit fairly. The research is based on the analysis of data on oil production, human development index (HDI) ranking, and GDP to debt ratio. We call for further research to develop effective policies that can address the relationship between energy and economic issues and propose future research directions to ensure that developing countries can benefit from their energy economies.

Thus, the global demand for copper increased exponentially as these industries expanded. The Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC), initially comprising Chile, Peru, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Zambia, sought to do for copper what the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had done for oil. As the second Industrial Revolution got underway in the latter half of the nineteenth century, demand for copper soared. [Extracted from the article]

"Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession" by Thomas Hendriks is a study that explores the agency of Congolese workers in a timber camp in rural Equateur province. The author analyzes the complex negotiations between the timber company, Congolese workers, and the surrounding community, focusing on moments of loss of control. The book examines the division of labor, labor relations, and the contradictions of European management's views of their Congolese employees. It highlights the coping mechanisms of Congolese workers and challenges the narrative of passive victimhood. However, the study lacks clarity on basic material interests and the daily struggles between labor and capital. It also exposes the advantages of timber companies over their workers and the limitations of neoliberal state rhetoric in enforcing obligations on foreign companies. Overall, "Rainforest Capitalism" is a significant contribution to the literature on labor, foreign investment, and Congolese society. [Extracted from the article]

This document is a correction notice for an article titled "The Causal Connection of Natural Resources and Globalization with Energy Consumption in Top Asian Countries: Evidence from a Nonparametric Causality-in-Quantile Approach." The authors have made updates to the text and references to improve clarity and accuracy. Changes include replacing terms like "carbon emanations" with "carbon emissions," "trade barricades" with "trade barriers," and "atmospheric downfall" with "climate disaster." The authors have also corrected citations for several references. The scientific conclusions of the article remain unaffected. [Extracted from the article]

The discovery of oil in Chad in the 1960s and its subsequent exploitation triggered the idea by international institutions that oil extraction would lead to sustainable development. Furthermore, Chad in tackling the resource curse would use rents to solve social, economic and security challenges on its territory. I argue that the state is the main actor in the resource curse, and its power derives rents from natural resources extraction. The curse emerges under local or international institutional pressures even if political outcomes are contextual and based on local norms. Drawing on theories of rentier state and developmental state, this paper seeks to critically explore local and international pressures that pull the state towards rentier behaviors resulting in poor local development outcomes.

Natural resources are extremely important to the economy, particularly in emerging nations such as the MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey) nations. To improve their economic performance, such nations put a priority on maximizing the use of natural resources. These natural materials are the basis on which all living creatures rely, and they are the primary motivation behind contemporary production. Therefore, the current research utilizes a dataset spanning the period from 1970 to 2019 to assess the effect of natural resource on economic growth for the MINT nations. The present study uses a unique quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) approach to assess this interrelationship. Furthermore, we apply the novel quantile causality suggested by Troster (2018), which identifies causality across quantiles. The findings from the QQR reveal that in the majority of the quantiles, the effect of natural resources on economic expansion is positive in Nigeria and Mexico, while it is negative in Indonesia and Turkey. In addition, a feedback causality is found between economic growth and natural resources for Mexico, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Based on the results, it is paramount for policymakers to develop policies or frameworks that promote cleaner energy sources and more effective use of natural resources, which can aid the country's economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given its tremendous natural resources, on the one hand, and its poor economic performance, on the other hand, the role of mining resources in the Guinean economy is often seen as a paradox. Guinea is one of the world's major bauxite producers for several decades. Based on this fact, this study aims to investigate the relationship between bauxite mining and economic growth in Guinea. We address this issue using both autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) models on annual data from Guinea over the period 1986–2020. Our results reveal that bauxite production has a positive impact on economic performance in Guinea. More precisely, the results indicate that, overall, bauxite production has a positive impact on both GDP and GDP per capita both in the short and long run. However, overall, this impact is statistically significant only in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an extensive literature demonstrating a positive link between export diversification and economic growth. In parallel, the resource curse thesis posits export concentration as an important mechanism curtailing growth in mineral-rich countries. Our analysis contributes to this literature by empirically investigating the interaction between oil dependence captured by the share of oil rents in GDP and export diversification and economic growth for Sudan. We do this with the help of a VAR model using annual data between 1960 and 2018. In comparison to earlier studies, our dataset covers also Sudan's post-oil boom period, which coincided with a substantial drop in oil dependence after the 2011 secession of South Sudan. We find that oil rents appear to have a statistically significant and negative effect on export diversification, although contemporaneously rather than in the long-term. However, we find no evidence of a statistically significant impact of either oil dependence or export diversification on economic growth, as suggested by the resource curse hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effect of natural resource wealth on sustainable economic development in the top 8 resource-abundant sub-Saharan African countries according to the World Bank Wealth of Nations 2018 over the period 1981–2017. The study incorporates public debt as an explanatory variable in our analysis, which is an extension of previous natural resource-growth estimations, to throw more light on how natural resource abundance and debt overhang simultaneously affect economic growth in resource-abundant sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The NARDL bounds testing approach and asymmetric Granger causality tests are employed. Long-run asymmetric effect results show that an increase in natural resource rents significantly increases economic growth in Equatorial Guinea. However, an increase in natural resource rents in the Congo republic negatively affects economic growth, validating the resource curse hypothesis. No significant effect was found in other countries studied. In terms of asymmetric causality results, no bidirectional causality between natural resource rents and economic growth was noted. We, however, identified a weak unidirectional asymmetric causality relationship running from economic growth to resource rents in the Congo Republic and natural resource rents to economic growth in South Africa. The study, therefore, suggests the implementation of efficient public debt management policies and an improvement in the quality of institutions for effective management of public loans and resource revenues to stimulate economic development in these resource-rich countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that landscapes of ruination and wasted labour are not an unfortunate finale in the history of mineral-rich cities under the "resource curse" but an always ongoing reality from the start of their involvement in the capitalist world market and pursuit of industrial modernity. Focusing on narratives about the "tin capital" Gejiu in southwestern China during the first half of the 20th century, I conduct a historical analysis and examine how geological and sociological experts introduced new politics of seeing and exploiting land and labour. Boasting the landscape of the industrial boom, Chinese intellectuals and technobureaucrats alike considered geological discoveries and resource extraction as a sign of a nation's civilizational status and modernization achievements. Their fascination with this outlying small town also exemplified a nationalist claim to the new Republican State's southwestern borderlands in an era of imperialist territorial divisions. Nonetheless, they had to constantly explain (away) appalling sights of environmental ruination and social polarization, often through promises of mechanization or labour welfare. Offering a close reading of travelogues, social surveys and scientific reports, I challenge the conventional narrative from prosperity to decline and reveal landscapes of ruination at the heart of modernization and nationalist discourse of conquering and utilizing natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resource curse literature suggests that, in fragile states dependent on natural resource rents, structures of public accountability are weak because of an elite-controlled political economy indifferent to social and ecological interests. We examine accountability claims made by non-domestic proxy actors, holding governments and corporations accountable on behalf of communities adversely affected by natural resources extraction. This conceptualization is suggested by proxy-led transnational mobilization against mining-related damage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We identify an 'hourglass' structure of proxy actor engagement with affected communities: In a first phase, proxies rely on public mechanisms to define standards remotely. In a second phase, proxies 'narrow' the gap by seeking compliance information from affected communities. However, in a third phase, this gap 'widens' again when proxies remotely seek sanctions against responsible actors. We discuss the applicability of this heuristic framework to proxy-led accountability practices in other natural resource-dependent rentier states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central issue in the scholarly literature on the Latin American Pink Tide is the renewal of state-led development, or neo-developmentalism, and dependence on primary resources or the so-called resource curse. In this article, we consider the question of neo-developmentalism during the Pink Tide and state capacity, analyzing whether the three 'radical' Pink Tide governments in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia were able to achieve their respective neo-developmental political objectives. We employ a comparative approach building on the theory of 'broadened embedded autonomy' as conceptualized by Peter Evans. We argue that while reliance on resource extraction posed a challenge for the construction of state capacity for Pink Tide governments, national-level differences help explain why some governments were relatively more successful than others at inducing neo-developmentalism. A comparative approach focused on the politics of state-society thus provides a promising analytical framework for interpreting variations across cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of oil in Chad in the 1960s and its subsequent exploitation triggered the idea by international institutions that oil extraction would lead to sustainable development. Furthermore, Chad in tackling the resource curse would use rents to solve social, economic and security challenges on its territory. I argue that the state is the main actor in the resource curse, and its power derives rents from natural resources extraction. The curse emerges under local or international institutional pressures even if political outcomes are contextual and based on local norms. Drawing on theories of rentier state and developmental state, this paper seeks to critically explore local and international pressures that pull the state towards rentier behaviors resulting in poor local development outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the Nile water has been at the heart of deteriorated relations between Egypt and Ethiopia and, more than ever before, this tension has reached to its climax since the inauguration ceremony of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project. The objective of this article was, therefore, to critically analyze the Nile water discourse, in Egypt and Ethiopia, often leading to irreconcilable interests and, by so doing, to add some insights on its viability to justify the resource curse and resource scarcity literatures in the field of security and conflict studies. Through a qualitative document review and discourse analysis of the key speeches of state officials in Egypt and Ethiopia, it was found out that the successful securitization of the Nile water in Egypt and the ongoing securitizing move of the same water resource in Ethiopia has been further complicating the Nile issue by producing more irreconcilable interests and tensions among the riparian states. Therefore it is recommended that rather than pushing a merely water resource issue to the level of an existential threat it is better for the riparian states to primarily focus on improving the life condition of their people (human security) and such reorientation will ultimately lead to a sustainable winwin solution for the whole Nile basin states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers development opportunities for countries that have abundant resources of cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium and manganese. Not surprisingly, developing countries have proposed ambitious plans to expand production of these raw materials. However, an observation from the resource curse literature is that strong institutions are required if they are to mitigate the risk of poorly directed, often excessively procyclical, investment, not least because of the complexity, opacity and price volatility of many raw materials utilised by global EV value chains. This paper examines the outlook for EV demand and associated raw material usage paying attention to the drivers and sensitivities required to assess and track future market transformations. These end use shifts are then placed in the context of the broader supply chain adjustments and trends shaping the demand. For resource exporters, adapting to structural change will require fiscal, regulatory, environmental and institution reforms designed to capture shifting patterns of resource wealth in a way which takes appropriate account of comparative advantages in specific value chains and mitigates adverse environmental and social consequences from their extraction and processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The "resource curse phenomenon" has received a lot of attention from researchers; however, there has not been any sound explanation to back this phenomenon since the main reason why natural resource should restrain economic growth instead of boosting economic growth remains unanswered. This paper contributes to literature on "resource curse hypothesis" by examining the role of government effectiveness in influencing the impact of gas resource rent on economic growth. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted the Cobb-Douglass production and incorporated gas resource rent, institutional quality (government effectiveness), inflation and exchange rate as additional variables that influences total output (gross domestic product). The author estimated the empirical form of the Cobb-Douglass production using autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and Toda and Yamamoto (1995) as the main estimation strategies while other time series approaches were used as a robustness check. Findings: The estimates from the ARDL short-run and the long-run dynamics suggest that the direct impact of gas resource rent on economic growth was positive but not statistically significant. At the same time, the interacting of gas resource rent and government effectiveness showed a positive and statistically significant effect of nearly 0.4123 and 0.8724 on economic growth in the long run and short run, respectively. The results from the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) also indicated that economic growth has a strong influence on gas resource rent while government effectiveness drives economic growth and not vice versa. Research limitations/implications: The findings from this study imply that government effectiveness plays a crucial role in averting the "resource curse phenomenon". Hence, improving government effectiveness and efficiency through minimizing corruption among state institutions would be imperative in curbing the "resource curse phenomenon" in developing countries. Originality/value: The influential role of government effectiveness on the relationship between gas resource rent on economic growth is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the socio‐economic dynamics that, in the Colombian case, underlie the relationship between mining and the territory where it takes place. The description includes the key features of public policy regarding mining, under which mineral resource extraction may have produced unintended effects that raise doubts regarding mining's contribution to Colombian economic development. Under a qualitative approach, I carried out a documentary analysis from which I identified several aspects of the economic and mining policy. The analysis confirms several of the explanations for the so‐called resource curse hypothesis, the connection between these aspects, and of them with specific policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]