IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v30y2021i4p349-369..html

The Oil Nouveau-Riche and Arms Imports

Author

Listed:
  • Pierre-Louis Vézina

Abstract

Countries that strike it rich when exploring for oil and gas often fail to see growth materialise. This paper shows that one way things can go awry is via squandering new wealth, based on future resource revenues, on arms imports. Across developing countries, in the 5 years following a giant oil or gas discovery, arms imports increase by 30% on average. This effect only occurs in non-democracies with high levels of corruption, and there is suggestive evidence that it is driven in part by arms imports from China and Russia, and not by imports from other major arms exporters. These estimates can be interpreted causally as the timing of giant oil discoveries is unpredictable due to the uncertain nature of exploration.

Suggested Citation

  • Pierre-Louis Vézina, 2021. "The Oil Nouveau-Riche and Arms Imports," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 30(4), pages 349-369.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:30:y:2021:i:4:p:349-369.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejaa017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Desroziers, Adrien & Kirat, Yassine & Reisinezhad, Arsham, 2025. "Carbon curse: As you extract, so you will burn," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    2. Ben Youssef, Slim, 2025. "The relationships between political stability, military expenditures, arms imports, and oil exports: a CS-DL approach for six Gulf countries," MPRA Paper 125364, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Battiston, Giacomo & Bizzarri, Matteo & Franceschin, Riccardo, 2025. "Third-party interest, resource value, and the likelihood of conflict," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    4. Adrien Desroziers & Yassine Kirat & Arsham Reisinezhad, 2023. "Carbon curse: As you extract, so you will burn," Working Papers 2023.09, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    5. Ben Youssef, Slim, 2025. "The relationships between political stability, arms imports, oil exports, and GHG emissions: a CS-DL approach for eight Gulf countries," MPRA Paper 124791, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • Q33 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Resource Booms (Dutch Disease)

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:30:y:2021:i:4:p:349-369.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.