"Development on the basis of extraction and export of natural resources is a dynamically complex problem. Empirical evidence shows that while some nations have been successful to translate natural resource wealth into long-term development but many have failed too. In this dissertation a system dynamics approach is taken to understand why this is happening and what strategies could facilitate a resource-based development process. In this regard, Mashayekhi’s model of oil-dependency of Iranian economy as one of the few relevant system dynamics examples is updated and revalidated. The results show that despite its capability in showing the dynamics of the problem from an economic perspective it lacks socio-political features that are necessary to address the most fundamental issues of resource-based development. It is shown that Katouzian’s theory of “arbitrary state and society” could fill this gap. The theory is, thus, translated into a system dynamics model so that it could be tested for internal consistency and used for policy analysis. The model is able to explain long-term socio-political-economic instability of a resource-dependent society. On the basis of Mashayekhi’s model, Katouzian’s theory, and other fundamental explanations of natural resource dependency that are available from the literature, a generic eclectic model is developed. The model has gone through a comprehensive list of confidence-building tests. Controlled experimentation through Monte Carlo simulations show that, on the contrary to the current belief, it is unlikely that natural resource wealth be harmful for social welfare. Results also revealed that rule of law is a crucial factor that affects trajectory of the socio-political-economic development. Other findings are as follow. Civil resistance (disobedience) can be harmful for the system in the long-run. While sanctions could affect the economy it has barely an impact on socio-political settings of a society. Finally, wage stabilization, facilitation of social mobility, and privatization of natural resource revenues within certain limits) could help the resource-based development to achieve better outcomes."

"Development on the basis of extraction and export of natural resources is a dynamically complex problem. Empirical evidence shows that while some nations have been successful to translate natural resource wealth into long-term development but many have failed too. In this dissertation a system dynamics approach is taken to understand why this is happening and what strategies could facilitate a resource-based development process. In this regard, Mashayekhi’s model of oil-dependency of Iranian economy as one of the few relevant system dynamics examples is updated and revalidated. The results show that despite its capability in showing the dynamics of the problem from an economic perspective it lacks socio-political features that are necessary to address the most fundamental issues of resource-based development. It is shown that Katouzian’s theory of “arbitrary state and society” could fill this gap. The theory is, thus, translated into a system dynamics model so that it could be tested for internal consistency and used for policy analysis. The model is able to explain long-term socio-political-economic instability of a resource-dependent society. On the basis of Mashayekhi’s model, Katouzian’s theory, and other fundamental explanations of natural resource dependency that are available from the literature, a generic eclectic model is developed. The model has gone through a comprehensive list of confidence-building tests. Controlled experimentation through Monte Carlo simulations show that, on the contrary to the current belief, it is unlikely that natural resource wealth be harmful for social welfare. Results also revealed that rule of law is a crucial factor that affects trajectory of the socio-political-economic development. Other findings are as follow. Civil resistance (disobedience) can be harmful for the system in the long-run. While sanctions could affect the economy it has barely an impact on socio-political settings of a society. Finally, wage stabilization, facilitation of social mobility, and privatization of natural resource revenues within certain limits) could help the resource-based development to achieve better outcomes."

This doctoral thesis presents a critical analysis of the global debate on the ‘good governance’ of the extractive resources sectors. Its starting point is that over the past decade this debate has seen a remarkable elevation, while at the same time the governance concept itself has been subjected to critique. To understand how the sector-focused ‘good governance’ agenda compares against this critique, the thesis uses a conceptual framework that identifies the different uses of this concept. Against this background, it reviews the main scholarly debates on the opportunities and challenges of countries producing extractive resources and identifies four critical questions, which it then sets out to answer. The main argument is that the global debate on the ‘good governance’ of the extractive resources sectors has been built on the widely endorsed conclusion that ‘good institutions’ make for better outcomes and that therefore producer countries need to improve their sector institutions. However, this seemingly obvious conclusion has ignored the complexity and confusion around ‘governance’ and ‘institutions’ that prevails across the broader social science literature. This argument is based on the answers the thesis provides to four critical questions: what are institutions; how do institutions change; how are they enforced; and do existing institutions matter for the design of interventions aimed at improving institutions. The thesis lays open that the policy conclusions of the global debate are premised on the dominance of a particular reference point paired with a particular methodology where the emphasis has been on, first, identifying the types of institutions that have apparently led to desired results, and then to promote these as a means to steer towards these results. It concludes that this focus has premised the global agenda on a false sense of clarity on what producer countries ought to be improving.

A variable screening method is introduced to reduce the computational cost caused by the curse of dimension of high dimensional problem in RBDO. The screening method considers the output variance of the constraint functions and uses test-of-hypothesis to filter necessary variables. Also, the method is applicable to implicit functions as well as explicit functions. Suitable number of samples to obtain consistent test result is calculated. 3 examples are demonstrated with detailed variable screening procedure and RBDO result.

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What effects do natural resources, and more specifically the revenues from the extraction and sales of commodities, have on the economies of well-endowed countries in Latin America? How does the political administration of natural resource wealth affect the economic trajectories of these developing countries? Under what conditions do countries successfully use political institutions to administer natural resource windfalls prudently? My dissertation addresses these questions and ultimately explains why natural resource wealth is a blessing for the development of some countries and a curse for others. Specifically, I examine the effectiveness of specific government institutions—called Nonrenewable Resource Stabilization Funds (NRSFs or stabilization funds), which help countries to manage the economic challenges associated with relying upon volatile natural resource revenues—in Chile and Venezuela, two natural resource-rich Latin American countries. Although both of these countries created a NRSF, Chile’s has been very successful while Venezuela’s was extremely weak from the outset. My research suggests that the degree of stabilization fund success—which impacts the severity of the resource curse—depends on these institutions constraining political actors from using rents for venal purposes. In turn, I find that the capacity of NRSFs to restrain the passions of self-interested executives is largely a product of the circumstances accompanying the creation of these institutions; that is, the conditions into which these institutions are born impact stabilization fund performance, but not in the way that the traditional literature predicts. In contrast to extant explanations suggesting that NRSF success is dependent upon clear institutional rules or general state capacity, I find that stabilization funds tend to be unsuccessful when political needs drove their creation while these institutions are likely to function well when economic concerns were the impetus for their adoption. I substantiate the case study evidence of Chile and Venezuela with a broad statistical analysis of 20 other countries that have created NRSFs. / text

The resource curse literature predicts how both aid and natural resources leads to real appreciation, hurting competitiveness and disfavoring the producing sector, which is bad news for a nation at the outset of its industrial buildup. Furthermore, a resource boom might lead to undesired behavior undermining national institutions – bearing implications of a “double resource curse”. Mozambique is an aid-dependent nation now facing the outbreak of a resource boom, as recent natural gas discoveries bring potential for transforming one of the world’s poorest countries to one of the world’s largest natural gas exporters within decades. The literature provides us with expectations of such successful transformation being dependent on both sound economic and institutional development. This study aims to uncover whether there are symptoms of Dutch Disease in the Mozambican economy, by tracking real appreciation through calculating effective exchange rate indices for the time period of 2002-2012 as well as analyzing sectoral development over the same time span. In continuation, we track institutional development in Mozambique with time-series data of institutional indicators developed by the World Bank. We find that institutions are weak and we observe signs of deterioration coupled with massive gas discoveries in recent years. The national economy is growing, and we cannot find signs of large shifts in sector development. However, the real exchange rate has appreciated in recent years. While the cause of this is not explained by our deployed literature, we find it interesting that fluctuations in foreign direct investments shows signs of correlation with the real exchange rate. The impact of FDI on developing economies will serve a potent variable for further research within resource curse frameworks.

Contrary to conventional theory, a growing body of evidence suggests that economies with abundant natural resources perform badly in terms of economic growth relative to their resource poor counterparts—the so-called resource curse hypothesis. However, this general hypothesis is not robust. It clearly fails to account for the differing experiences of resource abundant economies. For instance, the theory, applied generally, offers no explanation as to why economies like Botswana and Norway have exceptional growth while Saudi Arabia and Nigeria have stagnated. Prompted by these experiences, the thesis investigates the circumstances under which the curse is more or less likely to exist. In particular, the thesis finds evidence that the major reason for the diverging experiences is the differences in the quality of institutions across countries. The thesis tests the hypothesis that the effect of resources on growth is conditional on the type and quality of institutions, by further building on Boschini, Pettersson, and Roine’s (2007) and Mehlum, Moene, and Torvik’s (2006b) influential works on the role of institutions in mitigating the resource curse. Advances are made by: (a) using a panel of up to 53 countries with different levels of development, institutional quality and natural resource abundance over the period 1984-2003; (b) applying a two-step system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimation that accounts for biases associated with omitted variables, endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity that potentially affect existing cross-country Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) growth results; (c) supplementing results of the commonly used International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) institutional performance indicators with those of institutional design indicators–that is, highlighting the role of electoral rules and form of government; (d) using an institutional quality measure that is more related to financial institutions than just economic or political institutions; (e) using a resource abundance indicator that focuses on non-renewable resources alone rather than the ones commonly used in the literature that include renewable resources, which are inappropriate. The key hypothesis that natural resource economies are not destined to be cursed if they have good institutions is confirmed by the empirical results of the thesis. Specifically, the results suggest that (a) adopting a democratic regime is better than a non-democratic one, in terms of generating growth from resource abundance (b) the electoral rules that a country adopts matter, i.e. having a democratic proportional rather than a democratic majority regime increases the growth benefits of resource abundance (c) as far as the form of government adopted is concerned, a democratic parliamentary rather than a democratic presidential regime generates more economic growth from its abundant natural resource (d) a well functioning banking sector induces more (resource abundant generated) growth and capital accumulation. Therefore, the lessons for policy makers who struggle to overcome the impediments to economic development that potentially accompany the “curse of resource abundance” are the need to develop and maintain better institutions and adopt improved management strategies of the financial proceeds forthcoming from such abundance.

Contrary to conventional theory, a growing body of evidence suggests that economies with abundant natural resources perform badly in terms of economic growth relative to their resource poor counterparts—the so-called resource curse hypothesis. However, this general hypothesis is not robust. It clearly fails to account for the differing experiences of resource abundant economies. For instance, the theory, applied generally, offers no explanation as to why economies like Botswana and Norway have exceptional growth while Saudi Arabia and Nigeria have stagnated. Prompted by these experiences, the thesis investigates the circumstances under which the curse is more or less likely to exist. In particular, the thesis finds evidence that the major reason for the diverging experiences is the differences in the quality of institutions across countries. The thesis tests the hypothesis that the effect of resources on growth is conditional on the type and quality of institutions, by further building on Boschini, Pettersson, and Roine’s (2007) and Mehlum, Moene, and Torvik’s (2006b) influential works on the role of institutions in mitigating the resource curse. Advances are made by: (a) using a panel of up to 53 countries with different levels of development, institutional quality and natural resource abundance over the period 1984-2003; (b) applying a two-step system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimation that accounts for biases associated with omitted variables, endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity that potentially affect existing cross-country Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) growth results; (c) supplementing results of the commonly used International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) institutional performance indicators with those of institutional design indicators–that is, highlighting the role of electoral rules and form of government; (d) using an institutional quality measure that is more related to financial institutions than just economic or political institutions; (e) using a resource abundance indicator that focuses on non-renewable resources alone rather than the ones commonly used in the literature that include renewable resources, which are inappropriate. The key hypothesis that natural resource economies are not destined to be cursed if they have good institutions is confirmed by the empirical results of the thesis. Specifically, the results suggest that (a) adopting a democratic regime is better than a non-democratic one, in terms of generating growth from resource abundance (b) the electoral rules that a country adopts matter, i.e. having a democratic proportional rather than a democratic majority regime increases the growth benefits of resource abundance (c) as far as the form of government adopted is concerned, a democratic parliamentary rather than a democratic presidential regime generates more economic growth from its abundant natural resource (d) a well functioning banking sector induces more (resource abundant generated) growth and capital accumulation. Therefore, the lessons for policy makers who struggle to overcome the impediments to economic development that potentially accompany the “curse of resource abundance” are the need to develop and maintain better institutions and adopt improved management strategies of the financial proceeds forthcoming from such abundance.