On February 22, Sarah Brooks will be presenting a paper entitled, "Oil and Development: Technology, Geology, and the ‘Curse’ of Natural Resources." The abstract appears below and the paper is attached.
Abstract: In this paper we build upon our earlier research (Brooks and Kurtz 2016) to challenge the conventional wisdom about the putative ‘curse’ of natural resources. In doing so, we make a potentially controversial claim: that not all “oil wealth” is a curse. Rather, we argue that it is only the “easy to get” oil that can be associated with the pernicious developmental outcomes, while “hard to get” oil, such as that extracted through higher technologically-intensive methods, is not a curse for political development. Our empirical analysis employs a novel approach, by starting with the characteristics of more than 7,000 oil fields around the world to understand the technological intensity, and hence ‘rent’ possibilities for each field. We aggregate these data by country and find that indeed the oil that is extracted through highly capital-intensive processes has a positive, rather than detrimental, effect on democratic development. In making the argument, we emphasize the importance of domestic technological development, human capital, and the interdependence of regime types.
