An Educational Resource Curse? Mining boom and students' learning outcomes in sub-national governments in Peru

• In Event: The subnational resource curse in the Andes: Empirical evidence and policy implications

Abstract

Natural resource boom has recently attracted the attention of scholars but very little is known about the mechanisms that can explain the relationship between natural resource abundance and economic and political outcomes. We study the incentives that politicians face in terms of providing public goods and the consequences of such incentives on citizens' living standards. In particular, we are interested in exploring whether resource booms affects the incentives of providing basic education and how the investment in education in related to students' learning outcomes. We show that the relationship between mining rents and learning outcomes in non-monotonic, being positive for small magnitudes of rents but negative for very high levels. We relate this finding to existing models that suggests the existence of non-monotonicities in the relationship between rents and economic outcomes. We provide evidence to rule out alternative mechanisms such as local economic spillovers related to mining production and provide suggestive evidence that indicates that mining rents have been used to offer better labor conditions to teachers.

Author

• Stanislao Maldonado, Universidad del Rosario