IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/5742.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The"resource curse"in MENA ? political transitions, resource wealth, economic shocks, and conflict risk

Author

Listed:
  • Ross, Michael
  • Kaiser, Kai
  • Mazaheri, Nimah

Abstract

The recent political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a voluminous literature suggests can be associated with adverse development consequences, this paper examines the interplay between their associated rents and political economy trajectories. The contribution of the paper is threefold: first, to examine the quantitative evidence of violent conflict in the region since 1960; second, to provide a nuanced review of the regional case study literature on the relationship between resource endowments, political stability, and conflict risk; and third, to assess how prospective political transitions have implications for the World Bank Group's work in the region on public sector management and private sector development. The authors find that resources and regimes have intersected to provide stability and limited violent conflict in the region, but that these development patterns have yielded a set of policy choices and development patterns that are proving increasingly brittle and unsustainable. A major institutional challenge for reforms will be to consolidate a requisite degree of inter-temporal credibility and stability in these regimes, while expanding inclusiveness in state-society relations.

Suggested Citation

  • Ross, Michael & Kaiser, Kai & Mazaheri, Nimah, 2011. "The"resource curse"in MENA ? political transitions, resource wealth, economic shocks, and conflict risk," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5742, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5742
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2011/08/23/000158349_20110823114742/Rendered/PDF/WPS5742.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Badeeb, Ramez Abubakr & Lean, Hooi Hooi & Clark, Jeremy, 2017. "The evolution of the natural resource curse thesis: A critical literature survey," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 123-134.
    2. Ibrahim Ahmed Elbadawi & Raimundo Soto, 2012. "Resource Rents, Political Institutions and Economic Growth," Documentos de Trabajo 413, Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile..
    3. Roesmara Donna, Duddy & Widodo, Tri & Adiningsih, Sri, 2018. "Does Democracy Increase Bilateral Trade in MENA Region?," MPRA Paper 86369, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Hoda Selim & Chahir Zaki, 2014. "The Institutional Curse of Natural Resources in the Arab World," Working Papers 890, Economic Research Forum, revised Dec 2014.
    5. Dam, Lammertjan & Scholtens, Bert, 2012. "The curse of the haven: The impact of multinational enterprise on environmental regulation," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 148-156.
    6. Rafaelle Bertini & Abdallah Zouache, 2021. "Agricultural Land Issues in the Middle East and North Africa," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 80(2), pages 549-583, March.
    7. Syed, Qasim Raza & Durani, Farah & Kisswani, Khalid M. & Alola, Andrew Adewale & Siddiqui, Aaliyah & Anwar, Ahsan, 2024. "Testing natural resource curse hypothesis amidst geopolitical risk: Global evidence using novel Fourier augmented ARDL approach," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Environmental Economics&Policies; Post Conflict Reconstruction; Economic Theory&Research; Labor Policies; Emerging Markets;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5742. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.