The Varieties of Resource Experience: Natural Resource Export Structures and the Political Economy of Economic Growth

Abstract: Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration of growth since the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rodrik (1999) has demonstrated that the magnitude of a country’s growth deceleration since the 1970s is a function of both the magnitude of the shocks and a country’s “social capability ” for adapting to shocks. In this paper, we demonstrate that in this respect countries, with what we term “point source ” natural resource exports are doubly disadvantaged. Not only are countries with these types of exports exposed to terms of trade shocks, but the institutional capability for responding to shocks is itself endogenous and negatively…