The economic impact of natural resources

This paper explores the economic impact of natural resource endowment using quantitative comparative - case - study. Focusing on the Norwegian economy, due to availability of good quality data, the paper thoroughly examines the impact of petroleum endowment. Although the result suggests that the impact varies from year to year, it remains positive and very large. On average, about 20% of the annual GDP per capita increase is due to the endowment of petroleum resources such as oil, natural gas, natural gas liquids, and condensate. Examinations based on sensitivity test, robustness test, dose-response test, and various falsification tests suggest that the finding is robust to alternative explanations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.