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With heterogeneous findings dominating the growth and natural resources relations, there is a need to explain the variances in Africa's growth process as induced by robust measures of factor endowments. This study used a comprehensive set of data from the updated database of the World Bank to capture the heterogeneous dimensions of natural resource endowments on growth with a particular focus on establishing complementary evidence on the resource curse hypothesis in energy and environmental economics literature in Africa. These comprehensive data on oil rent, coal rent and forest rent could provide new and insightful evidence on obscure relations on the subject matter.

This paper considers the panel vector error correction model (PVECM) procedure to explain changes in economic growth outcomes as induced by oil rent, coal rent and forest rent. The consideration of the PVECM was premised on the panel unit root process that returns series that were cointegrated at the first-order differentials.

The paper found positive relations between oil rent, coal rent and economic development in Africa. Forest rent, on the other hand, is inversely related to economic growth in Africa. Trade and human capital are positively related to economic growth in Africa, while population growth is negatively associated with economic growth in Africa.

Short-run policies should be tailored towards the stability of fiscal expenditure such that the objective of fiscal policy, which is to maintain the condition of full employment and economic stability and stabilise the rate of growth, can be optimised and sustained. By this, the resource curse will be averted and productive capacity will increase, leading to sustainable growth and development in Africa, where conditions for growth and development remain inadequately met.

The originality of this paper can be viewed from the strength of its arguments and methods adopted to address the questions raised in this paper. This study further illuminated age-long obscure relations in the literature of natural resource endowment and economic growth by taking a disaggregated approach to the component-by-component analysis of natural resources factors (the oil rent, coal rent and forest rent) and their corresponding influence on economic growth in Africa. This pattern remains underexplored mainly in previous literature on the subject. Many African countries are blessed with an abundance of these different natural resources in varying proportions. The misuse and mismanagement of these resources along various dimensions have been the core of the inclination towards the resource curse hypothesis in Africa. Knowing how growth conditions respond to changes in the depth of forest resources, oil resources and coal resources could be useful pointers in Africa's overall energy use and management. This study contributed to the literature on natural resource-induced growth dynamics by offering a generalisable conclusion as to why natural resource-abundance economies are prone to poor economic performance. This study further asks if mineral deposits are a source or reflection of ill growth and underdevelopment in African countries.

This study aims to present an empirical investigation on the effect of natural resource rent on income inequality in Algeria over the period 1980–2020.

The analysis is carried out by using the novel developed method dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) simulation technique alongside the Kernel-based regularized least squares.

The bounds test revealed a long-run relationship between natural resource rent and income inequality. Our estimation results suggest that natural resource rent, GDP per capita and government expenditures are all associated with lower income inequality in the short and long term. Moreover, the author found that better institutional quality is more likely to reduce income inequality in Algeria. This empirical finding is further validated by the counterfactual shocks from the dynamic ARDL simulation, which reveal a significant decrease in predicted income inequality following a positive change in resource rents and a gradual, significant increase in inequality after a negative change in resource rents.

The present study is the first to use the dynamic ARDL model to investigate the impact of positive and negative changes in natural resource rent on income inequality in Algeria.

The reduction of income inequality and the ways to fight against it are source of debate among scientific communities and policymakers. Rents from natural resources that African countries are endowed with remain one way to cope with income inequality, but its influence on income inequality is mixed. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore the direct and indirect transmission mechanisms through which natural resources rents can affect income inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.

This study obtained data on income inequality from the Standardised World Income Inequality Data database, natural resources rents from World Bank’s Development Indicators and education from United Nations Development Programme for the period 1990–2018. It was analysed using system generalised method of moments.

The results of this study showed that natural resources rents solely increased income inequality, but its interaction with education significantly reduced income inequality.

These findings suggest that the reduction of income inequality by natural resources rents passes through a good education system in sub-Saharan African countries.

In previous studies, authors analysed the role of education in the relationship between natural resources rents and income inequality by inserting the two variables separately in the model. But in this paper, the author analysed the role of education in the relationship between natural resources rents and income inequality by using the interaction of natural resources rents and education.

The paper assesses the role of natural resource rents in Nigeria's economy through the channel of institutional quality.

The analysis is done with the use of autoregressive-distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, vector error correction model (VECM), Granger causality test and cointegrating regression over the period 1996–2019.

Findings support the notion that overreliance on natural resources could exacerbate the growing number of dysfunctional economic outcomes in the country. The study confirms that a mix of weak governance quality and natural resource rents could have a negligible effect on economic growth and possible retardation impact on the economy in the long run as well as in the short run. The evidence further reveals that there is unidirectional causality running from the interaction term to growth, suggesting that growth trajectory could be jointly determined by natural resource rents and the quality of institutions.

The divergent arguments associated with the mechanisms of resource curse in each of the resource-rich countries offer ample support for the contention that economic outcomes in resource-abundant states may not be a product of resource windfalls per se, but rather the quality of governance or ownership structure. Hence, the ultimate aim of the analysis is to further understanding on the link between resource rents and growth in Nigeria via governance channel.

This study aims to analyze the effects of natural resource rents on income inequality.

This study uses a panel quantile regression (QR) approach for 42 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1998–2018.

The results show that natural resource rents have a negative and statistically significant effect on income inequality. Regarding the types of resources, the results show that coal rents increase inequality, while forestry and oil rents reduce income inequality. The results also show that the effects of mining and gas rents vary along the income inequality distribution. Finally, the results reveal a negative and significant effect of natural resource rents on income inequality in all sub-regions except Southern Africa.

The results suggest that the SSA Governments should intensify the implementation of income redistribution policies such as family allowances to poor families with multiple children and public sector job creation. SSA policymakers should also increase access to electricity, and internet, and allocate a portion of oil revenues to create an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund.

First, few studies have analyzed the effects of various types of natural resource rents on income inequality. To this end, this study used the QR method to examine the impact of natural resource rents on inequality, by laying emphasis on various types of natural resources. This study takes into account the likely heterogeneity across countries that may exist when considering a sample such as SSA countries, by examining the effects in the different sub-regions that make up this part of Africa (Central Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa and East Africa).

The “resource curse phenomenon” has received a lot of attention from researchers; however, there has not been any sound explanation to back this phenomenon since the main reason why natural resource should restrain economic growth instead of boosting economic growth remains unanswered. This paper contributes to literature on “resource curse hypothesis” by examining the role of government effectiveness in influencing the impact of gas resource rent on economic growth.

The study adopted the Cobb-Douglass production and incorporated gas resource rent, institutional quality (government effectiveness), inflation and exchange rate as additional variables that influences total output (gross domestic product). The author estimated the empirical form of the Cobb-Douglass production using autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and Toda and Yamamoto (1995) as the main estimation strategies while other time series approaches were used as a robustness check.

The estimates from the ARDL short-run and the long-run dynamics suggest that the direct impact of gas resource rent on economic growth was positive but not statistically significant. At the same time, the interacting of gas resource rent and government effectiveness showed a positive and statistically significant effect of nearly 0.4123 and 0.8724 on economic growth in the long run and short run, respectively. The results from the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) also indicated that economic growth has a strong influence on gas resource rent while government effectiveness drives economic growth and not vice versa.

The findings from this study imply that government effectiveness plays a crucial role in averting the “resource curse phenomenon”. Hence, improving government effectiveness and efficiency through minimizing corruption among state institutions would be imperative in curbing the “resource curse phenomenon” in developing countries.

The influential role of government effectiveness on the relationship between gas resource rent on economic growth is examined.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the resource rents–quality-adjusted human capital nexus and the impact of quality of institutions.

For a large data set of 161 countries for the period 1996–2018 (yearly and 4-year periods), fixed effect estimation method is applied to investigate the impact of resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital and the role of quality of institutions on this relationship.

The paper found little evidence on the negative, significant and direct impact of total resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital. However, the results show that the negative effect of resource rents can be mediated by the quality of institutions. This result is robust to a long list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. Therefore, institutional quality seems to play a critical role in determining the indirect impact of natural resources on human capital. Moreover, the obtained results demonstrate that this resource adverse effect depends on the type of resource rents; in particular, high dependency on oil rents in developing countries appears to harm human capital.

The paper shows that it is not obvious that total resource rents decrease human capital and found that the coefficient is no longer significant in the two-way fixed effects model. However, the analysis has emphasized the crucial role of political institutions in this relationship and has shown that countries with higher quality of institutions make the most of their resource rents transiting to a better human capital environment. This result is found to be robust to a list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. In addition, we demonstrate that not all resources affect human capital in the same way and found that oil rents have a significant negative effect on human capital. This is an important distinction since several countries are blessing from oil rents. From this we conclude that the effect of natural resources on human capital varies across different types of commodities. On the other hand, the interaction between institutions and the sub-categories of resource rents shows that oil rents can increase human capital only in developing countries with higher quality of institutions (above the threshold). This result is also still hold while using alternative measures of political institutions.

The results in this paper have important policy implications. In particular, results highlight important heterogeneities in the role resource rents to the economy. As international commodity prices have shown high volatility in recent years, it is important for policy makers to understand the rents. Rents which are the difference between the price of a commodity and the average cost of producing it can have different effects in the economy, including the human capital. It is shown that in countries with low-quality institutions, natural resource rents negatively affect institutional quality, leading to conflicts, corruption and fostering rent-seeking activities. Overall, this reinforces the elite at the power that, obviously, is interested in preserving the status quo. In other words, there is a vicious circle between resource rents and low-quality institutions that impedes institutional change. How to regulate this in the best possible way requires a good understanding of how resource rents are generated and appropriated for different sectors, their different effects and how people react to these rents. The evidence suggests the policy toward better political institutions may help countries to improve social outcomes such as health and education which offer high social returns.

The paper is part of the author's PhD research and is an original contribution.

This study aims to investigate the implications of natural gas rents and institutions as co-drivers of economic growth, focusing on the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) with panel data between 2001 and 2021.

This research paper uses a specialised two stage estimator, the panel instrumental variable technique (panel IV), which takes care of the potential endogeneity issues in the model.

The findings show that natural gas rent significantly impacts the economic growth of the GECF. On average, natural gas rent increases the sample’s growth rate by about 2.634% percentage points in the short run. The result indicates that the qualities of institutions (political and economic) have a significant positive long-term effect on the economies of the GECF. In addition, the study’s energy price volatility positively correlates with the countries’ growth.

There might be a need to investigate the effects of natural gas rents and institutions as co-growth drivers in each country within the GECF. The likelihood exists that the impact of natural gas rents and institutions on economic growth at the country’s level may differ from the outcome of such an experiment on the group level. Because of space and time limitations, this study could not carry out the specific country’s investigation of natural gas rents and institutions as a co-growth driver. That limitation may constitute further study to advance this study to a new height.

With good institutions, natural gas rent is likely to be an alternative growth driver for some economies that rely on fossil fuels like oil as a growth driver. By extension, the GECF has the potential to rival Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the global energy market, particularly in achieving Sustainable Development Goal number seven. In essence, evidence in this study suggests that natural gas rent has long-term positive effects on the growth of the GECF, conditioned on good institutions. Moreover, the drive of global energy consumption towards sustainable energy usage is an economic blessing for the GECF. By extension, the demand for natural gas would continue to rise, creating opportunities to improve natural gas rents. By implication, the GECF would continue to benefit from the pursuit of sustainability as the world shifts towards energy consumption with less CO₂.

Firstly, this study models the qualities of institutions for the GECF. Secondly, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first attempt to examine natural gas rents and the qualities of institutions as co-determinants of economic growth among the GECF (a potential cartel).

The paper aims to assess the institutional readiness of Ghana prior to and after the production of her first oil. The paper also assesses the influence of politics in directing the appropriate use of the oil rents in facilitating the developmental needs of the country.

The paper uses a literature review of the main theories regarding national politics and institutional policies in explaining the economic demise of a country due to a natural resource find. It also uses the natural resource find in Norway as a case study, drawing lessons from the effectiveness of Norway’s institutional policies in harnessing maximum benefits from their oil find and how developing nations such as Ghana can do same.

The paper establishes that Ghana’s institutional architecture as regards the production of oil and gas is fraught with inadequacies on all fronts as regards regulations, regulators and the needed logistics. Additionally, the paper also highlights the role of Ghana’s political elite in perpetuating these institutional inadequacies.

The paper highlights the insufficiencies in the institutional readiness for Ghana’s oil find and brings to the fore the influence of Ghana’s politics in contributing to these inadequacies.

While the relationship between natural resource rent and economic growth is well documented in the literature, not much robust analysis has been done to estimate the causative relationship between oil resource rent and economic growth in Ghana. This might be due to the fact that commercial production of crude oil started not long ago in Ghana. This paper aims to examine the causal relationship between oil resource rent and economic growth for the period of 2011 to 2020 in Ghana.

The study incorporates economic growth as a function of oil resource rent, non-oil revenue, foreign direct investment, capital and interest rate in a Cobb–Douglass production function/model. The study used four different estimation strategies including the autoregressive distributed lags model, Toda–Yamamoto test approach, nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags model and nonlinear Granger causality.

The main finding revealed that 1% increase in oil resource rent generates 0.84% increase in economic growth of Ghana in the long run. Contrary, the authors find an insignificant positive effect of oil resource rent on economic growth of Ghana in the short run for the period under study. The result from the Toda–Yamamoto test approach also showed a unidirectional causality running from oil resource rent to economic growth of Ghana, providing evidence in support of the resource blessing hypothesis in Ghana. The results are robust to two different alternative estimation strategies.

The causal relationship between crude oil resource rent and economic growth is examined.