Is there a resource curse phenomenon for natural gas?

• Autor(a) principal: Pires, Patrícia Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/9850
• topic: Ardl; Crescimento Económico; Gás Natural; Maldição dos Recursos; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This study focuses on the natural gas-economic growth nexus and intends to test the hypothesis of “resource course”. Panel data techniques were applied to investigate the role of natural gas in economic growth, for 25 producers of natural gas, from 1993 to 2015. Consequently, three different approaches were used and compared, in order to test the “resource curse” hypothesis, namely: production, reserves, and the rents approach. Due to the data characteristics, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) proved to be the most suitable for capturing the dynamic relationship in short- and long-run effects. The Driscoll-Kray estimator with fixed effects was used, given the presence of the phenomena of heteroscedasticity, first order autocorrelation, contemporaneous correlation and cross-sectional dependence. Results suggest that natural gas consumption drives economic growth in both the short- and long- run. The presence of the resource curse phenomenon was not validated for any of the three approaches. Policymakers should realize the characteristics of natural gas as a transition source. Indeed, natural gas does not fit the pattern of dependency as is historically observed in producers’ countries for other resources, such as oil.