Oil and Development: Technology, Geology, and the ‘Curse’ of Natural Resources

In this paper we build upon our earlier research (Brooks and Kurtz 2016) to challenge the conventional wisdom about the putative ‘curse’ of natural resources. In doing so, we make a potentially controversial claim: that not all “oil wealth” is a curse. Rather, we argue that it is only the “easy to get” oil that can be associated with the pernicious developmental outcomes, while “hard to get” oil, such as that extracted through higher technologically-intensive methods, is not a curse for political development. Our empirical analysis employs a novel approach, by starting with the characteristics of more than 7,000 oil fields around the world to understand the technological intensity, and hence ‘rent’ possibilities for each field. We aggregate these data by country and find that indeed the oil that is extracted through highly capital-intensive processes has a positive, rather than detrimental, effect on democratic development. In making the argument, we emphasize the importance of domestic technological development, human capital, and the interdependence of regime types. Work in progress – Comments Appreciated! Prepared for the Columbia University International Politics Seminar. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Political Economy Society, 2017, the Varieties of Rentierism Workshop, LSE, 2016, and the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.