OxCarre Conference: Natural Resources and Instability

It starts tomorrow! Programme here!

Managing the revenue from natural resources—what’s a Finance Minister to do?

IMF: The Finance Minister answers her mobile. On the line is the Minister of Energy, who informs her that the country has struck oil and that he expects revenues from its sale to start flowing into the budget in the coming four years. While excited by the prospects of higher revenues—indeed the average resource-rich country gets more than 15 percent of GDP in resource revenues—she starts to ponder how to use these revenues for her country’s development. She is aware that only in rare cases have natural resources served as a catalyst for development; too often they have led to economic instability, corruption, and conflict or what has been termed as “the resource curse.”

Natural Resource Charter Conference Live

Natural#Resource #Charter2014 conference with @NRGInstitute. Live webstream!

A carbon tax could have achieved Obama's new climate goals and raised $24 billion a year

Vox: One frustrating aspect of America's seemingly endemic congressional dysfunction is that we end up with policy results that are worse from all points of view than could be achieve with a more constructive legislature.

Readings for the weekend

From the latest Oxford Economic Papers:

• Mineral resources and conflicts in DRC: a case of ecological fallacy?
• Democratizing for peace? The effect of democratization on civil conflicts
• Disasters and development: natural disasters, credit constraints, and economic growth

Five More Ways to Fight Global Warming

Bloomberg View: 

• establish an office for cheaply transferring the benefits of US government-funded fracking and solar research to Chinese companies
• Pay China to implement these technologies
• Tax carbon-intensive imports
• Increase research funding for solar technology in the US 
• Implement a carbon tax or equivalent here in the US

Readings for the week

• Economic Journal (forth.): The Economic Aftermath of Resource Booms: Evidence from Boomtowns in the American West
• Resources Policy: Has Bolivia׳s 2006–12 gas policy been useful to combat the resource curse?
• Institute for International Economics: Confronting the Curse: The Economics and Geopolotics of Natural Resource Governance
• Journal of Comparative Economics: Income Growth, Ethnic Polarization, and Political Risk: Evidence from International Oil Price Shocks
• Environmental and Resource Economics: Trade and renewable resources in a second best world