Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/115475 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-509
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been mostly on the study of cross sectional data at the national level, with limited empirical use of exogenous differences in the abundance of natural resources at the subnational level. We explore the case of Peru, a mining-rich middle income country where -exploiting a unique data set constructed for this purpose- we are able to assess systematic differences in district-level welfare outcomes between mining and non-mining districts. We find evidence that the condition of being mining-abundant district have a significant impact on the pace of reduction of poverty rates and inequality levels. We also estimate a heterogeneous response to the mining-abundant condition, finding stronger responses in lower-poverty, higher-inequality districts. Finally, we find a trend suggesting incremental positive marginal effects of the level of exposure to mining transfer, as proxy for the degree of abundance of mining activities, on the reduction of poverty and inequality.
Subjects: 
Natural resource curse
Resource booms
Mining transfers
Poverty
Inequality
Treatment effect models
JEL: 
C21
D63
H76
I32
O13
Q33
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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