The Natural Resource Curse, Fiscal Decentralization, and Agglomeration Economies

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 ...

Urban Transport Expansions, Employment Decentralization, and the Spatial Scope of Agglomeration Economies

This paper investigates the relationships between urban highway construction and the decentralization of jobs and workers’ residential locations by industry between 1960 and 2000. Estimates indicate that highways cause significantly greater amounts of residential than job decentralization both overall and in each broad industry category. Identification of these treatment effects relies on exoge...

The Curse Of Natural Resources In The Transition Economies

The curse of natural resources is a well-documented phenomenon in developing countries. Economies that are richly endowed with natural resources tend to grow slowly. Among the transition economies of the former " Eastern Bloc " , a similar pattern can be observed. This paper shows that a large part of the variation in growth rates among the transition economies can be attributed to the curse of...

Globalization and Fiscal Decentralization

The international integration of markets and the decentralization of authority within nation states are two defining trends of the contemporary era. A popular speculation is that globalization has caused a downward shift in the locus of governance by reducing the economic costs of smallness and allowing localities and regions with distinctive preferences to pursue their own political and econom...

Fiscal Decentralization in D Eveloping and Transition Economies : Progress, P Roblems and the Promise