A large body of literature has arisen in economics and political science analyzing the apparent “resource curse”—the tendency of countries with high levels of natural resources to exhibit worse economic and political outcomes. The author examines the purported causal mechanisms underlying this “curse” and shows that they all center on the revenue that these resources generate for the government...

We present a Stackelberg model of conflict, in which contestants have limited endowments to be put in two separate sectors, thus incorporating salient features of many conflicts. The model is applied to the case of conflict over natural resources. Consistent with amounting empirical evidence regarding a so-called ”resource curse”, we find that the relation between conflict intensity and resourc...

empirical evidence seems to indicate that economic growth has varied inversely with natural resource abundance across countries, in which high natural resources dependent economies experience the low economic growth. this paper first reviews the literature of resources curse and shows that the most important challenges of economic development of iran are those mechanisms that change the blessin...