The More the Merrier? Natural Resource Fragmentation and the Wealth of Nations

We exploit differences in the number and distribution of natural resources to estimate the presence of a curse of natural resources on economic growth. Building on a sample of 93 developing and developed countries covering the years 1980 to 2007, we show that, given the value of the resource endowment, the higher the number of resources is, the higher is a country's per-capita growth. This finding is robust to the addition of all usual controls and to the splitting of the dataset into subsamples such as non-OECD or non-African countries only.