New OxCARRE Research: Left in the Dark? Oil and Rural Poverty

OxCARRE's Sam Wills [wordpress.com] and Brock Smith [brockdsmith.com] brought a new research paper,

Left in the Dark? Oil and Rural Poverty

Abstract

Oil booms do not benefit the rural poor. To show this we combine data on night-time lights and population at a very fine (1 km2) resolution to construct global measures of rural poverty from 2000-2013. We find that oil booms, due either to high prices or new discoveries, increase GDP per capita. However, the increase in output is limited to cities and towns, and does not benefit the rural poor. We also find that while urbanization is occurring throughout the developing world, it is not being hastened by oil wealth.

Available here [oxcarre.ox.ac.uk, pdf].