Reasons for minerals remains in developing countries
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Since 1995, when Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner published their influential study claiming that natural resource abundance has a strong negative impact on growth, the term “resource curse” has been associated with mineral wealth in developing countries. Their study has been challenged by Lederman and Maloney (2007), who found natural resource abundance to have a positive effect on growth, and by Goderis and Collier (2007), who found that high oil and mineral prices mostly have a negative impact on long-term growth only in exporting countries with bad governance. A new World Bank study puts natural resource curse theory under scrutiny once again.
Extractives specialists Gary McMahon and Susana Moreira find that many, indeed most, of the world’s fastest-growing countries since 2000 have been resource-rich. Their paper, The Contribution of the Mining Sector to Socioeconomic and Human Development, shows that low and middle-income mining countries grew by over one percent annually faster than similar non-mining countries from 2001 to 2011