本篇論文透過國家脆弱程度與資源依賴之間的關係之研究以檢視資源詛咒。本論文寫作之目的在於探究即便國際社會逐漸增加對於透明性之訴求的情況下，撒哈拉以南非洲地區之非法自然資源貿易仍存在之緣由。文章主要討論三個問題：第一、國家脆弱程度是否對撒哈拉以南非洲地區國家之非法自然資源剝削造成影響？第二、在剛果的鈳鉭鐵礦貿易對於非法自然資源貿易透露出什麼訊息？第三、中國是如何對剛果開採的鈳鉭鐵礦之國際貿易造成影響？為找出上述問題之答案，本文運用了綜合的研究方法。以跨時間序列的回歸研究設計套用於49個撒哈拉以南非洲地區國家，用以解釋下述兩個變項之關係：IV代表脆弱國家指數、DV代表出口與服務占國內生產毛額之百分比。一項與波札那鑽石產業有關之剛果鈳鉭鐵礦貿易之個案研究，為非法貿易、來源、路線以及生存工具提供了更深入的觀察視野。最後，本文認為衰弱的中央政府，以及國際的漏洞使得自然資源的非法貿易成為可能。 / This thesis examines the resource curse through a study of the relationship between state fragility and resource dependency. The purpose of this thesis is to uncover why illegitimate trade of natural resources occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite greater international push for transparency. 3 main questions are posed; 1. Does state fragility impact illegitimate natural resource exploitation in SSA countries? 2. What information does the coltan trade in Congo reveal about illegitimate trade of natural resources? 3. How has the Chinese Gateway impacted the international trade of Congolese mined coltan? To answer these set of questions, a mixed methods research approach is employed. A cross times series regression research design with a data set of 49 SSA countries is used to identify and explain the relationship between two variables IV: Fragile State Index and DV: Exports and Services (% of GDP). A case study on the coltan trade in Congo in relation to Botswana’s Diamond Industry, provides a closer look at illegitimate trade, its sources, routes and means of survival. Ultimately this thesis argues that weakened central governments, along with international loopholes enables the illegitimate trade of natural resources.

This thesis seeks to verify the concept of so-called resource curse at the beginning of the new millennium. The theoretical part defines the symptoms of the alleged curse, curse transmission channels and criticism of the concept. Compared to other studies dealing with the theme of the resource curse this work is not focused on just one transmission channel. The practical part verifies several hypotheses established by comparing research papers on impacts of natural resources. The validity of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis, Dutch disease symptoms and a negative impact on political institutions (inclination toward authoritarianism, high level of corruption, high government spending, low efficiency of economic and political decision-making and low investment in education) is verified. For the analysis have been selected two African countries (Nigeria and Botswana) and two advanced countries (Canada and Norway). The last part of this thesis provides policy implications. The results confirm the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis for selected commodities in the long term and some of the symptoms of Dutch disease at the beginning of the new millennium. Hypotheses regarding the impact on the political institutions have not been confirmed, since the results varied across the countries. The high vulnerability of the countries to movements in commodity prices was found.

The thesis is concerned with the influence of the income from oil industry on the economies of Algeria and the United Arab Emirates in the years 2000-2015. The topic is analysed from the point of view of the resource curse theory. This theory is defined as a negative relationship between excess of a non-renewable resource and economic performance. Alongside with the negative economic growth, the experts defined other factors linked to the resource curse. The method used in the thesis is an analysis of these indicators on the example of Algeria and the UAE, and subsequently the dangers of resource curse are identified. The thesis evaluates, based on the comparison of the performance of selected factors, the economical and institutional development of the chosen countries. In the conclusion the diversification efforts of the UAE in the economic field and relatively safe economic development of Algeria are commented. More or less positive tendencies may be observed also in the development of most of the institutional indicators of both countries.

Diplom thesis discusses a question of influence of mineral resources on politics and economics in chosen countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. The paradox of low economic development of many resource rich countries significantly engaged in international trade is often discussed by economic experts. I decided to focus on Sub-Saharan Africa because I consider this region to be unable to fully use its potential for economic development despite being very rich in natural resources.Target of this thesis is to find out which natural resources exist in chosen countires, how the countries manage them, how successfull their economic development is, which problems they currently handle and how their current situation is related to their historic, cultural and politic background. For the purpose of my thesis I have chosen Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Botswana.

The main part of this thesis is composed of three separate chapters, each using an innovative approach to analysing externalities from economic activity. The general introduction and overall conclusion sections complete the structure of the thesis. Chapter one examines the value of statistical life, an essential parameter used in ascribing monetary values to the mortality costs of air pollution in health risk analyses. This willingness to pay estimate is virtually non-existent for most developing countries. In the absence of local estimates, two major benefit transfer approaches lend themselves to the estimation of the value of statistical life: the value transfer method and the meta-regression analysis. Using Nigeria as a sample country, we find that the latter method is better tailored than the former for incorporating many characteristics that vary between study sites and policy sites into its benefit transfer application. It is therefore likely to provide more accurate value of statistical life predictions for very low-income countries. Employing the meta-regression method, we find Nigeria’s value of statistical life estimate to be $489,000. Combining this estimate with dose response functions from the epidemiological literature, it follows that if Nigeria had mitigated its 2006 particulate air pollution to the World Health Organisation standards, it could have avoided at least 58,000 premature deaths and recorded an avoided mortality related welfare loss of about $28 billion or 19 percent of the nation’s GDP for that year. The second chapter applies the quantile fixed effects technique in exploring the CO2 environmental Kuznets curve within two groups of economic development (OECD and Non-OECD countries) and six geographical regions – West, East Europe, Latin America, East Asia, West Asia and Africa. A comparison of the findings with those of the conventional fixed effects method reveals that the latter may depict a flawed summary of the prevailing income-emissions nexus depending on the conditional quantile examined. We also extend the Machado and Mata decomposition method to the Kuznets curve framework to explore the most important explanations for the carbon emissions gap between OECD and Non-OECD countries. We find a statistically significant OECD-Non-OECD emissions gap and this contracts as we ascend the emissions distribution. Also, had the Non-OECD group the incomes of the OECD group, the former would pollute 26 to 40 percent more than the latter ceteris paribus. The decomposition further reveals that there are non-income related factors working against the Non-OECD group’s greening. We tentatively conclude that deliberate and systematic mitigation of current CO2 emissions in the Non-OECD group is required. The final chapter employs the Arellano-Bond difference GMM method in investigating the oil curse in OECD and Non-OECD oil exporting countries. Empirical studies investigating the natural resource curse theory mostly employ cross-country and panel regression techniques subject to endogeneity bias. Also, most of these studies employ GDP in its aggregate or per-capita terms as the outcome variable in their analyses. However, the use of GDP measures of income for resource curse investigations does not portray the true incomes of resource intensive economies. Standard national accounts treat natural resource rents as a positive contribution to income without making a corresponding adjustment for the value of depleted natural resource stock. This treatment, inconsistent with green national accounting, leads to a positive bias in the national income computations of resource rich economies. Our paper deviates from most empirical studies in the literature by using the Arellano-Bond difference GMM method. We test the robustness of the curse in the predominantly used measures of national income, GDP, by investigating the theme in genuine income measures of economic output as well. We employ two alternative measures of resource intensity in our explorations: the share of oil rents in GDP and per-capita oil reserves. Our results provide evidence of the curse in Non-OECD countries employing aggregate and per-capita measures of genuine income. On the other hand, we find oil abundance to be a blessing rather than a curse to the OECD countries in our sample.

Diplomová práce - abstrakt Dulovcová Iva Abstract The main objective of this Master thesis is to test the hypothesis that economic dependence on the export of minerals allows the monopolization of power and thus reduces the possibility of democracy. The hypothesis will be tested on cases of mineral economies in Peru, Bolivia and Chile. The hypothesis is based on the resource curse theory, which assumes a negative relationship between the presence of natural resources, their export, and level of democracy. In this thesis I expanded this theory with mineral economies factor, therefore beyond purely petroleum countries. Another expansion of the theory lies with international dimension that strongly influences events in selected countries. The thesis will analyze cases of Peru, Bolivia and Chile, especially role of natural resources in these countries, but also economic results and role of democracy in selected countries. In this thesis I use qualitative and quantitative elements. Economic and political development will be analyzed on the basis of process analysis method and method of dependence on previous development. The validity of theoretical concept for these cases will be tested on the basis of the compliance method. Quantitative part of the thesis will be based on causal mechanisms designed by Ross. By...

La théorie de la viabilité propose des outils permettant de contrôler un système dynamique afin de le maintenir dans un domaine de contraintes. Le concept central de cette théorie est le noyau de viabilité, qui est l’ensemble des états initiaux à partir desquels il existe au moins une trajectoire contrôlée restant dans le domaine de contraintes. Cependant, le temps et l’espace nécessaires au calcul du noyau de viabilité augmentent exponentiellement avec le nombre de dimensions du problème considéré. C’est la malédiction de la dimension. Elle est d’autant plus présente dans le cas de systèmes incorporant des incertitudes. Dans ce cas-là, le noyau de viabilité devient l’ensemble des états pour lesquels il existe une stratégie de contrôle permettant de rester dans le domaine de contraintes avec au moins une certaine probabilité jusqu’à l’horizon de temps donné. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier et de développer des approches afin de combattre cette malédiction de la dimension. Pour ce faire, nous avons proposé deux axes de recherche : la parallélisation des calculs et l’utilisation de la théorie de la fiabilité. Les résultats sont illustrés par plusieurs applications. Le premier axe explore l’utilisation de calcul parallèle sur carte graphique. La version du programme utilisant la carte graphique est jusqu’à 20 fois plus rapide que la version séquentielle, traitant des problèmes jusqu’en dimension 7. Outre ces gains en temps de calcul, nos travaux montrent que la majeure partie des ressources est utilisée pour le calcul des probabilités de transition du système. Cette observation fait le lien avec le deuxième axe de recherche qui propose un algorithme calculant une approximation de noyaux de viabilité stochastiques utilisant des méthodes fiabilistes calculant les probabilités de transition. L’espace-mémoire requis par cet algorithme est une fonction linéaire du nombre d’états de la grille utilisée, contrairement à l’espace-mémoire requis par l’algorithme de programmation dynamique classique qui dépend quadratiquement du nombre d’états. Ces approches permettent d’envisager l’application de la théorie de la viabilité à des systèmes de plus grande dimension. Ainsi nous l’avons appliquée à un modèle de dynamique du phosphore dans le cadre de la gestion de l’eutrophisation des lacs, préalablement calibré sur les données du lac du Bourget. De plus, les liens entre fiabilité et viabilité sont mis en valeur avec une application du calcul de noyau de viabilité stochastique, autrement appelé noyau de fiabilité, en conception fiable dans le cas d’une poutre corrodée. / Viability theory provides tools to maintain a dynamical system in a constraint domain. The main concept of this theory is the viability kernel, which is the set of initial states from which there is at least one controlled trajectory remaining in the constraint domain. However, the time and space needed to calculate the viability kernel increases exponentially with the number of dimensions of the problem. This issue is known as “the curse of dimensionality”. This curse is even more present when applying the viability theory to uncertain systems. In this case, the viability kernel is the set of states for which there is at least a control strategy to stay in the constraint domain with some probability until the time horizon. The objective of this thesis is to study and develop approaches to beat back the curse of dimensionality. We propose two lines of research: the parallel computing and the use of reliability theory tools. The results are illustrated by several applications. The first line explores the use of parallel computing on graphics card. The version of the program using the graphics card is up to 20 times faster than the sequential version, dealing with problems until dimension 7. In addition to the gains in calculation time, our work shows that the majority of the resources is used to the calculation of transition probabilities. This observation makes the link with the second line of research which proposes an algorithm calculating a stochastic approximation of viability kernels by using reliability methods in order to compute the transition probabilities. The memory space required by this algorithm is a linear function of the number of states of the grid, unlike the memory space required by conventional dynamic programming algorithm which quadratically depends on the number of states. These approaches may enable the use of the viability theory in the case of high-dimension systems. So we applied it to a phosphorus dynamics for the management of Lake Bourget eutrophication, previously calibrated from experimental data. In addition the relationship between reliability and viability is highlighted with an application of stochastic viability kernel computation, otherwise known as reliability kernel, in reliable design in the case of a corroded beam.

The resource curse hypothesis suggests that resource-rich countries (especially oil-dependent economies) show lower economic growth rate as compared to resource-poor countries. We contribute to this literature by providing empirical evidence on a new transmission channel of the resource curse, namely the negative long-run effect of oil rents on the quality of education. Our empirical analysis for more than 70 countries from the period of 1995–2015 shows a significantly positive effect of oil rents on the quantity of education measured by government spending on primary and secondary education. However, we find a robust and negative long-run effect of oil rents dependency on the objective and subjective indicators of quality of education. Further, panel regressions with country and year fixed effects support our cross-country findings on the negative effect of oil rents dependency on the quality of education.

Modern science is turning to progressively more complex and data-rich subjects, which challenges the existing methods of data analysis and interpretation. Consequently, there is a pressing need for development of ever more powerful methods of extracting order from complex data and for automation of all steps of the scientific process. Virtual Scientist is a set of computational procedures that automate the method of inductive inference to derive a theory from observational data dominated by nonlinear regularities. The procedures utilize SINBAD – a novel computational method of nonlinear factor analysis that is based on the principle of maximization of mutual information among non-overlapping sources (Imax), yielding higherorder features of the data that reveal hidden causal factors controlling the observed phenomena. One major advantage of this approach is that it is not dependent on a particular choice of learning algorithm to use for the computations. The procedures build a theory of the studied subject by finding inferentially useful hidden factors, learning interdependencies among its variables, reconstructing its functional organization, and describing it by a concise graph of inferential relations among its variables. The graph is a quantitative model of the studied subject, capable of performing elaborate deductive inferences and explaining behaviors of the observed variables by behaviors of other such variables and discovered hidden factors. The set of Virtual Scientist procedures is a powerful analytical and theory-building tool designed to be used in research of complex scientific problems characterized by multivariate and nonlinear relations.

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