Cursed by resources or institutions?

Natural resource abundant countries constitute both growth losers and growth winners, and the main difference between the success cases and the cases of failure lays in the quality of institutions. With grabber friendly institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down, while with producer friendly institutions more natural resources increase income. Such a theory finds strong support in data. A key question we also discuss is if resources in addition alter the quality of institutions. When that is the case, countries with bad institutions suffer a double resource curse - as the deterioration of institutions strenghtens the negative effect of more natural resources.Natural resources; Institutional quality; Growth; Rent-seeking

Employment as a Price or a Prize of Equality: A Descriptive Analysis

To put Scandinavian employment in perspective, we ask whether wage compression hampers employment rates, or not. We answer by reviewing the most important theoretical arguments and the most informative regularities across countries with different wage distributions. The pattern seems to be that countries with compressed wage distributions tend to have higher employment, and countries with higher wage inequality tend to have lower employment. This also holds when we consider the rate of labor force participation. In line with the theoretical arguments, coordination in wage bargaining seems to contribute to both employment expansion and wage compression. There is a clear positive correlation between coordination and employment even when we control for inequality, country, and year-specific effects

Opium for the Masses? Conflict-Induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have strong impact on subsequent local opium production. This proxy is shown to be exogenous to opium. We exploit the discontinuity at the end of the planting season: Conflicts have strong effects before and no effect after planting, assuring causality. Effects are strongest where government law enforcement is weak.conflict, narcotics production, resource curse, Afghanistan

Governance and Development

In this paper we discuss whether or not `governance' is an important source of variation in development experiences. We draw four main conclusions. First, governance is best thought of a sub-set of `institutions' and as such emphasis on governance is consistent with much recent academic work. Nevertheless, governance is a quite vague rubric which it is difficult to unbundle. Second, the governance of a society is the outcome of a political process and as such is closely related to the literature on the political economy of development. Third, improving governance necessitates understanding the nature of the entire political equilibrium. Finally, an important research frontier is understanding the forces that create or impeded endogenous changes in governance.

Rising Inequality in the Egalitarian Nordics

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Rich meets Poor - An International Fairness Experiment

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements, and nationality in people's social preferences, we conducted a real effort fairness experiment where people in two of the world's richest countries, Norway and Germany, interacted directly with people in Uganda and Tanzania, two of the world's poorest countries. In this experiment, the participants were given the opportunity to transfer money to poor persons with whom they were matched. The study provides four main findings. First, entitlement considerations are crucial in explaining the distributive behavior of rich people in the experiment; second, needs considerations matter a lot for some participants; third, the participants acted as moral cosmopolitans; and finally, the participants' choices are consistent with a self-serving bias in their social preferences

Poverty and Landownership.

The author studies how landownership affects labor allocation, income distribution, and poverty in less-developed countries. He focuses on three prototypes of ownership classes: landlords, smallholders, and landless people. Agents are identical except for their ownership of assets. On the basis of optimizing behavior, they divide into urban workers in the modern sector, urban workers in the informal sector, agricultural laborers, subsistence farmers, and landlords. The impact of land reform on production and poverty depends on the amount of fertile land per capita. A more egalitarian distribution of landownership reduces poverty where land is scarce but not where land is abundant. Copyright 1992 by American Economic Association.