Happiness and the Resource Curse

Sabna Ali; Mansoob Murshed; Elissaios Papyrakis

doi:10.1007/s10902-019-00080-3

Happiness and the Resource Curse

Sabna Ali, Mansoob Murshed, Elissaios Papyrakis

College of Business & Law

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

33 Citations (Scopus)

117 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in the so-called ‘resource curse’: the tendency of resource-rich countries to underperform in several socio-economic outcomes. More recently, several papers have looked beyond the traditional impact on economic growth and instead focused on the effects upon broader human welfare indicators. A separate empirical literature in recent decades has probed into the determinants of happiness and subjective well-being (using either country or household data). Our paper contributes to the literature
by bringing these two empirical strands of research together. This is the first study, to our knowledge, that makes use of a large panel dataset to explore the links between changes in happiness across countries and several measures of resource wealth. Consistent with prior empirical evidence of a resource curse in oil-rich nations, we find that oil rents are negatively linked to improvements in happiness over time. This happiness ‘resource curse’ curse appears to be oil-specific and holds both for the levels as well as changes in happiness.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	437-464
Number of pages	28
Journal	Journal of Happiness Studies
Volume	21
Issue number	2
Early online date	23 Feb 2019
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00080-3
Publication status	Published - Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2019 Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

Keywords

Cross-country analysis
Happiness
Mining
Resource curse

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1007/s10902-019-00080-3Licence: CC BY

PublishedFinal published version, 958 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "Happiness and the Resource Curse",

abstract = "There has been increasing interest in the so-called {\textquoteleft}resource curse{\textquoteright}: the tendency of resource-rich countries to underperform in several socio-economic outcomes. More recently, several papers have looked beyond the traditional impact on economic growth and instead focused on the effects upon broader human welfare indicators. A separate empirical literature in recent decades has probed into the determinants of happiness and subjective well-being (using either country or household data). Our paper contributes to the literatureby bringing these two empirical strands of research together. This is the first study, to our knowledge, that makes use of a large panel dataset to explore the links between changes in happiness across countries and several measures of resource wealth. Consistent with prior empirical evidence of a resource curse in oil-rich nations, we find that oil rents are negatively linked to improvements in happiness over time. This happiness {\textquoteleft}resource curse{\textquoteright} curse appears to be oil-specific and holds both for the levels as well as changes in happiness.",

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Happiness and the Resource Curse

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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