The Brazilian Amazon: a resource curse or renewed colonialism?

Deforestation Slowdown in the Brazilian Amazon: Prices or Policies?

Deforestation and biomass decay have accounted for approximately 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2007).1 This raises concerns about the extent of forest clearings in the Amazon, the planet’s largest rainforest tract. The region has long been the world’s most active agricultural frontier in terms of forest loss and CO2 emissions. In Brazil, the conversion of forest areas in the Def...

The Resource Curse: A Statistical Mirage? Resources

A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth. It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures. This paper establishes an alternative explanation a slow-growing resource sector. A declining resource sector is disproportionally re ected in resource-dependent countries but appears to have little a ect on the res...

The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle is not confined to individual anecdotes or case studies, but has been borne out in econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance across a comprehensive sample of countries. The ...

The Resource Curse: A Corporate Transparency Channel*

We propose and investigate a new channel through which the resource curse a stylized fact that countries rich in natural resources grow slower operates. Predatory governments are more likely to expropriate corporate profits in natural resource industries when the price of resources is higher. Corporations whose profits are more dependent on the price of resources can mitigate the risk of exprop...

The Resource Curse: A Corporate Transparency Channel *