Research Question of the Article: Ross’s research attempts to examine the claim of natural resource wealth’s impact on the governance of the country (240). The research study explores the relationship between resource endowments (cause variable) and three effect variables of ‘incidence of civil war,’ ‘quality of state institutions,’ and ‘government accountability.’ The first research question aims to explore the most robust findings on the aforementioned relationship of variables. The second research attempts to address the major challenges of those findings, along with their respective validity. Lastly, the third research question explores the knowledge (research) gaps that are most vital to the assessment.
Main Arguments and Theories: The ‘resource curse’ is the adverse effects of a country’s natural resources on socioeconomic and political development. The research highlights the three main debates: the conditions that facilitate the three effects of triggering violent conflicts, heightening corruption, and ensuring the durability of authoritarian regimes. The second debate pertains to the mechanism that assists in the generation of conditional effects, although the effect of petroleum on civil conflict has consensus amongst researchers on the underlying process. The third debate relates to the illusory or real nature of the resource curse, and a minority of research literature points toward the econometrics issue of omitted-variable bias and sometimes endogeneity. However, some researchers argue that the damaging effects of the petroleum (resource) curse may be real, but commonly overlooked beneficial effects may counter-balance them. A limitation of the study is reliance on observational data in existing literature for assessment of the resource curse. The qualitative nature of the variable makes it difficult to measure phenomena such as civil wars or the quality of institutions.
The paper highlights the increasing reliance on sub-national data sets in literature for analyzing the relationship in-depth, which is better than the studies relying on a single observation for each country in a time series manner, although authoritarian durability is hard to measure with sub-national data. The three main sections of the body include democracy and democratization, incidence of civil war, and quality of government institutions. Existing literature suggests that higher levels of oil wealth contribute positively to the stability of autocratic governments. For example, the author quotes Ahmadov’s (2014) research findings that suggest oil has a negative, robust, and nontrivial effect on democracy (Ross 243).
Closing Thoughts: The paper concludes with a presentation of three harmful effects of one type of mineral wealth, that is, petroleum. First, it tends to strengthen authoritarian regimes and adds durability to the functioning of regimes. Second, it leads to corruption, but not all types of corruption. Third, it also leads to conflict and violence in countries that are low and middle-income. In the ‘looking ahead’ section of the paper, the author concludes the considerable evidence for supporting all three broad claims, that is, higher levels of receipt from petroleum result in durable and authoritarian regimes and rulers, coupled with increasing the likelihood of government corruption, and resource wealth low and middle-income countries with marginalized ethnic groups tend to have sustained conflicts. In the section on future research gaps, researchers argue that the existing literature on the subject matter limits itself to the three research questions discussed in the paper or generally focuses on the impact of resource wealth on economic growth. However, other dimensions of the sociopolitical life of people living in a country with high resource wealth have unique research outcomes, which include gender equality and education levels in the region, coupled with trends of demographics, cooperation, conflict at the international level, and government transparency.
Discussion Question: What do you think is that the outcome of more corruption, less democracy, and more civil conflict makes the country less resource-abundant?
Works Cited
Ross, Michael L. “What have we learned about the resource curse?.” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 239-259.
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