Dissecting the Natural Resource Literature: A New Data Set

• In Event: Exploring the New Frontiers of Natural Resource Politics

Abstract

Social scientists have consistently bundled different types of natural resources in the same category when analyzing their political and economic effects. These could include energy resources like oil, natural gas, and coal or other rare minerals. Such “resource income” has also been treated under nontax revenues literature where scholars claimed they were to function the same way as other nontax revenues, like international aid.
In this paper, we develop an alternative to this approach. Natural resource production and trade processes are extremely variant based on the type of resource and extraction procedure. We identify how geological characteristics affect production cost of natural resource production, such as in onshore and offshore oil and gas, and how they could influence resource income and the degree of associated economic activities brought by natural resource production. Further, we show how the chemical state of natural gas limits transportation options, creating additional costs for buyers and sellers in the market. Often neglected in the literature, such different processes of extraction and transportation of energy resources create varying dynamics between the stakeholders, including interdependencies.
This paper theorizes the relevance of these geological and chemical differences found in natural resource production and transportation and introduces a new data set on different types of natural resources at country level, showing how such resources can have different effects on energy producing countries compared to the rest of the world.

Authors

• Renato Lima-De-Oliveira, Asia School of Business, in collaboration with MIT-Sloan

• Ruchan Kaya, Austin College