Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Hicks, Barbara

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

The resource curse describes a situation where countries that are rich in point-­‐ source natural resources do not translate their resource wealth into positive political and economic results. The majority of resource-­‐rich countries instead experience challenges to develop relative to their resource-­‐poor counterparts, including greater prevalence of authoritarianism, instability, and low economic performance. A minority of resource-­‐rich countries have been able to defy the poor development results that would come with the resource curse, some even thriving as prosperous, stable democracies. Through a conceptualization of resource wealth that attempts to combine resource endowment and dependency and an analysis utilizing Spearman testing and Linear Regressions, this research explores the conditions that may best account for the disparities in the experiences of resource-­‐rich countries. The results provide tentative support for the Modernization effect to account for the disparities in the levels of economic performance in resource wealthy countries, and for the Repression effect to account for the presence or lack of authoritarianism. In both of these instances, the Modernization and Repression effect were able to account for differences within resource-­‐rich countries that a control measure of corruption and institutional quality could not explain with the same power. The study also contains a qualitative overview of the cases which provides additional backing for the findings of Ross and Carmignani, whose research suggested oil shares a particular relationship to authoritarian rule, and that Sub-­‐Saharan Africa as a region is vulnerable to particularly severe forms of the resource curse.

Download

Share

COinS