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Natural Resource Diversity and Democracy *
Author(s) -
Smart Mike
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
economic papers: a journal of applied economics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1759-3441
pISSN - 0812-0439
DOI - 10.1111/j.1759-3441.2010.00046.x
Subject(s) - democratization , autocracy , natural resource , resource curse , per capita , democracy , index (typography) , economics , resource (disambiguation) , diversity (politics) , commodity , development economics , market economy , political science , law , sociology , politics , demography , world wide web , computer science , computer network , population
The well‐known link between oil and autocracy is an example of a more general phenomenon. I introduce a non‐commodity‐specific predictor of autocracy based on the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index of a country’s natural resource exports. It performs no worse than the export share of oil, and better than the export share of primary commodities in explaining observed levels of democratisation. Empirical evidence is presented for a causal chain from diversity of natural resources and educational attainment to democratisation, and from democratisation to per capita GDP.