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Natural Resources, Democracy and Corruption

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  • Sambit Bhattacharyya
  • Roland Hodler

Abstract

We study how natural resources can feed corruption and how this effect depends on the quality of the democratic institutions. Our game-theoretic model predicts that natural resources lead to an increase in corruption if the quality of the democratic institutions is relatively poor, but not otherwise. We use panel data covering the period 1980 to 2004 and 99 countries to test this theoretical prediction. Our estimates confirm that the relationship between resource abundance and corruption depends on the quality of the democratic institutions. In particular, resource abundance is positively associated with corruption only in countries that have endured a nondemocratic regime for more than 60 percent of the years since 1956. Our main results hold when we control for the effects of income, time varying common shocks, regional fixed effects and various additional covariates. They are also robust to various alternative measures of natural resources, corruption and the quality of the democratic institutions. These findings imply that democratization can be a powerful tool to reduce corruption in resource-rich countries.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by The University of Melbourne in its series Department of Economics - Working Papers Series with number 1047.

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Length: 36 pages
Date of creation: 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:mlb:wpaper:1047

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Postal: Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne, 5th Floor, Economics and Commerce Building, Victoria, 3010, Australia
Phone: +61 3 8344 5289
Fax: +61 3 8344 6899
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Web page: http://www.economics.unimelb.edu.au
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Keywords: Natural resources; democracy; political institutions; corruption;

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  1. After Gaddafi, will Libya's 'resource curse' become a blessing?
    by Fabrizio Carmignani, Senior lecturer, School of Economics at University of Queensland in The Conversation on 2011-10-04 19:38:11
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