Papua New Guinea looks to entrepreneurs to escape ‘resource curse

Financial Times: In Port Moresby’s heavily fortified Royal Papua Yacht Club, all the talk is of the coming slowdown as the construction of a $19bn ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas project nears completion.
The luxury waterfront apartments that flank the recently extended marina are mostly occupied by expatriates working on the development, which has propelled annual gross domestic product growth to 8 per cent over the past five years but also driven property and food prices to painfully high levels...

Replicating Sachs and Warner's Working Papers on the Resource Curse

Journal of Development Studies: This article reports on my attempt to replicate Sachs and Warner's 1995 and 1997 resource curse working papers. The 1995 paper is not replicable for lack of a data archive. Pure replication of the 1997 paper is achieved. Statistical replication determines that the proposed institutional causes of the resource curse are not robust to country sample. Scientific replication shows that findings of a resource curse are not sensitive to different measures of resource intensiveness, though they are sensitive to estimation technique. Typographical errors in the published paper reveal the value of researchers making both their data and code available.

A Blessing in Disguise: The Implications of High Global Oil Prices for the North American Market

Bank of Canada WP: We examine the implications of increased unconventional crude oil production in North America. This production increase has been made possible by the existence of alternative oil-recovery technologies and persistently elevated oil prices that make these technologies commercially viable. We first discuss the factors that have enabled the United States to expand production so rapidly and the glut of oil inventory that has accumulated in the Midwest as result of logistical challenges and export restrictions. Next, we assess the extent to which the increase in U.S. domestic production will affect global supply conditions and whether the U.S. experience can be repeated in other countries with rich unconventional oil sources. The evidence suggests that even in the best-case scenario, the increase in U.S. production will not make a large contribution to global production, so its effect on the price of oil is expected to be limited. Furthermore, the United States enjoys unique infrastructural and technological advantages that make it unlikely that similarly rapid increases in unconventional production can be achieved elsewhere.

Energy use and growth

The Economist:  ... US GDP growth per capita between 1986 and 2011 averaged 2.5%; energy use per capita fell 0.17% a year over the same period. The same effect appears elsewhere. The peak of energy use per person in Britain occurred in 1973; in Germany, it was 1979. Some of this, of course, is because the oil shock of the 1970s made us shift to more efficient cars and heating systems; more generally, the economy is dematerialising. You are reading this article online; these blogs are an additional service to the reader that were not available 20 years ago. Individual journalists are more productive in the sense that, as well as articles in the printed magazine, they blog, tweet and do podcasts - all of which require very little use of physical resources. As Mr Harford points out, New York is a pretty advanced city - but it uses much less energy per person than the US as a a whole, and indeed uses less than the average of any other state...

Saudi doesn’t want to talk about the shale boom

Your Middle East:  At the May 31stmeeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi was asked one too many times about the shale revolution:

“Why are you all excited all of a sudden on shale? You know why, because you like to chit chat…you are an agent of disturbance,” he said, pointing a finger at his questioner. “Leave us alone and leave all these issues. We had enough of shale oil and talks of shale. Please talk about anything else,” he said, switching from English to Arabic.

Growth in commodity-exporting emerging markets may be over

Roubini at Project Syndicate: ...the commodity super-cycle that helped Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and many other commodity-exporting emerging markets may be over. Indeed, a boom would be difficult to sustain, given China’s slowdown, higher investment in energy-saving technologies, less emphasis on capital- and resource-oriented growth models around the world, and the delayed increase in supply that high prices induced.

Guinea's anti-corruption activists raise doubts over mining crackdown

The Guardian: ... government figures convened investors at a hotel in London last month to promote the merits of doing business in the west African country. At the heart of efforts to attract investors are reforms to the mining code, and the creation of a committee to re-evaluate all 18 mining contracts and make recommendations for some to be renegotiated. "We are making an in-depth assessment of the contracts. If there are some imbalances, our mandate is to negotiate with the mining companies in order to regulate them," says Nava Touré, president of the committee. But the review has come under criticism from all sides. Mining companies – many of which are watching the criminal investigation of BSG Resources (BSGR), which is accused of using bribery to obtain concessions – are nervous about the prospect of scrutiny and dubious about being asked to renegotiate legally binding contracts. Anti-corruption activists say the process lacks teeth and depends on the goodwill of companies to renegotiate the terms of mining deals, something the government admits...