Song Yiming: The Political Pathology of the "Economic Resource Curse": Research Evolution and Intellectual Genealogy
I. Introduction For most resource-abundant countries, the slowing or even stagnation of economic growth is a primary symptom accompanying resource development and export. This pathological phenomenon and its generative mechanisms, labeled the "economic resource curse," constitute a highly contested research topic and an extremely important research agenda within political science. For a long time, research in this field has centered on discussions regarding the authenticity of the "economic resource curse" phenomenon, its generative mechanisms, and its generative conditions. Among these, the discussion on the authenticity of the phenomenon has gradually reached a consensus; speculation on its generative conditions is currently ascendant; however, research on its generative mechanisms—namely, the pathological study of the "economic resource curse"—remains in a stage of fierce debate. Traditional explanations have become increasingly refined, emerging explanations continue to surface, and alternative explanations clash intensely.
At present, the urgent priority in this field of study is to conduct a comprehensive review of the existing stock of research on the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse," rather than blindly expanding its incremental growth. This is primarily because, on one hand, while a vast amount of empirical research has provided numerous perspectives on the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse," the orientation toward mutual falsification has not substantially advanced the discussion of the issue at a theoretical level; instead, it has caused complication and fragmentation of arguments at the empirical level. In response, this article does not seek to engage in direct dialogue with the aforementioned studies through empirical analysis. Instead, it attempts to step outside the confines of falsification to re-examine the pathological mechanisms through which the "economic resource curse" is generated by sorting through the major findings and progress within the scope of political science. On the other hand, political science research on the "economic resource curse" has developed over decades into a vast lineage of knowledge, which means that tracing the genealogy of research and reflecting on the research process is itself a vital component of the field. However, earlier literature reviews are no longer sufficient to characterize recent progress; furthermore, literature reviews in recent years are not only few in number but are also mostly confined to the authors' own sub-fields, failing to present a comprehensive view of the field's basic landscape. Consequently, this article attempts to systematically sort out the macro-lineage and major progress of the political pathology of the "economic resource curse."
Based on this, the remainder of this article provides analysis from five aspects: Part II traces the evolution of the pathology of the "economic resource curse" along a longitudinal temporal dimension. Part III characterizes the current disciplinary distribution of research in this field along a horizontal disciplinary dimension. Part IV presents the major intellectual contributions revealing the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" within the disciplinary scope of political science. Part V discusses the current primary dilemmas and future research agenda of the field. Part VI is the conclusion.
II. The Evolutionary Process of the Pathology of the "Economic Resource Curse" Tracing back to the 18th and 19th centuries, classical economists had already recognized the positive role of resources in economic growth, but they clearly paid insufficient attention to the constraints they might impose. Scholars such as William Petty elucidated that resources in a broad sense, represented by land, contribute to the creation of private wealth and national economic growth. In their view, however, labor and capital were clearly much more important for economic growth than resources. This lack of cognitive awareness regarding resource constraints was criticized by Richard Auty as the "careless hubris of the nineteenth-century economists"; under the influence of research inertia, this led subsequent economists to fail to effectively focus on or seriously explore the restrictive effects of resources on economic growth for a long period.
It was not until the 1950s–1970s that some structuralist economists noted the phenomenon of resource exports in developing countries and the accompanying unequal exchange; the corresponding discussions can be regarded as the first stage of research into the pathology of the "economic resource curse." At that time, economists represented by Arthur Lewis and Jacob Viner firmly believed that resource-rich developing countries would achieve faster economic growth than resource-poor ones, as resources could provide the necessary capital for industrialization and export diversification. This view was criticized and challenged by structuralist economists, and the debate surrounding the relationship between resources and economic growth became one of the focal points of the debate between structuralist and non-structuralist economics throughout the 1950s–1970s. Development economists such as Raul Prebisch and Hans Singer observed the "anomaly" wherein some developing countries in Latin America and Africa exported large quantities of resources but failed to achieve economic growth. To this end, they offered explanations from three aspects: First, the conditions under which developing countries participate in international trade and their own endowments differ significantly from those of developed countries, making it difficult for the former's resource endowments to naturally transform into drivers of economic growth as they did for the latter. Second, violent fluctuations in resource prices on the international market are transmitted to the domestic economies of resource-exporting countries, affecting government finances and foreign exchange earnings. Third, resource development and export dominated by Western resource corporations resulted in unequal exchange between developing and developed countries; resource exports did not actually create additional profits for resource-exporting countries capable of driving the development of other industries. It can be said that structuralist economists provided the earliest explanations for the causes of the "economic resource curse."
The second stage, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, benefited from innovations in observational perspectives and core concepts, leading the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" to gradually gain the attention of mainstream economics. If the first stage of research was driven by the critiques of structuralist economics, the second stage was clearly driven by the innovation of core concepts. This stage can be further divided into three waves based on differences in core concepts: The first wave originated in 1970 with Hussein Mahdavy’s discussion of the rent-seeking effects in Middle Eastern resource-exporting countries; his pioneering concept of the "rentier state" was also the earliest abstract description of the "resource curse." The second wave began in 1982 with Max Corden and Peter Neary’s exploration of the de-industrialization phenomenon in the Netherlands following the development of Groningen gas; their original concept of "Dutch Disease" is regarded as a vital concept for characterizing the pathological mechanism of the "economic resource curse." The third wave began in 1988 with Alan Gelb’s discussion of oil "windfalls," but a more symbolic marker was Richard Auty’s first use of the term "resource curse" in 1993 and his systematic proposal of the hypothesis that resources drag down economic growth. These concepts, with their literary flair, not only successfully attracted high levels of attention from academia, policy circles, and even the public, but the innovation in observational perspectives behind them further propelled research on the causes of the "economic resource curse" rapidly toward maturity.
From the mid-1990s to the present, the third stage, driven by both mechanism discovery and empirical testing, has seen the pathology of the "economic resource curse" become more academic and refined. Starting with the groundbreaking empirical study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner in 1995, research on the causes of the "resource curse" entered a brand-new phase of identifying pathological mechanisms and subjecting them to empirical testing. Depending on the choice of explanatory variables and mechanisms, this stage can be roughly divided into two waves: the first originated with the aforementioned study by Sachs and Warner. Inspired by this research, economists, on one hand, conducted detailed testing of traditional explanatory mechanisms such as "Dutch Disease," price volatility, and terms of trade; on the other hand, they revealed new mechanisms affecting economic growth, such as resource types and debt. The precursor to the second wave lay in Terry Lynn Karl’s exploration of the "paradox of plenty" in petrostates, but its substantial starting point should be traced back to Michael Ross’s 1999 elucidation of the "political economy of the resource curse." At this point, the pathology of the "economic resource curse" officially entered the research agenda of political science, after which political scientists attempted via empirical research to explore the root causes of the "economic resource curse" from perspectives such as rent-seeking, civil war, and state capacity. Unlike the three successive waves of the second stage, the two waves of the third stage emerged and developed in parallel, a trend that continues to this day.
III. Disciplinary Distribution of Research on the Pathology of the "Economic Resource Curse" Current research on the pathology of the "economic resource curse" has exhibited clear multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary characteristics. Although using disciplinary categories as a framework for literature review inevitably risks some degree of self-confinement, the disciplinary attributes of research exploring the causes of the "economic resource curse" remain distinct in terms of variable selection and analytical perspectives. Overall, research within different disciplines presents a divide between micro and macro levels. Some disciplines focus on using micro-variables to explore the "economic resource curse" and its governance within specific administrative regions of a country, while other disciplines lean toward conducting cross-national comparisons and exploring structural causes of the "economic resource curse" at a macro level.
At the micro level, research on the "economic resource curse" is primarily concentrated in disciplines such as regional economics, public administration, human geography, and environmental sociology. As the largest branch at the micro level, research within the scope of regional economics mainly examines the reasons why specific regions within a country fall into or avoid the "economic resource curse" by analyzing variables such as technological innovation, social capital, and human resources. Research within the scope of public administration mostly focuses on exploring the causes and governance of the "economic resource curse" from aspects closely related to government or state governance, such as corruption, political culture, macro-policies, bureaucratic administrative capacity, fiscal revenue and expenditure, or government functions. Research within the scope of human geography primarily studies the causes of the "resource curse" by analyzing geography-related variables such as the spatial structure of resources and geographical location. As another major branch at the micro level, research within the scope of environmental sociology discusses the causes of the "economic resource curse" more broadly. However, because environmental sociology itself is highly focused on resource issues, its choice of variables and perspectives is more generalized and complex. In addition to the four disciplines above, disciplines previously regarded as distant or not directly related to the pathology of the "economic resource curse," such as anthropology, have also begun to explore the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" at the micro level.
Overall, the studies discussing the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" at the micro level exhibit the following four characteristics: First, they focus more on analyzing the empirical phenomenon of the "economic resource curse" at the level of sub-national administrative regions; the identification and narrative mode of this empirical phenomenon are clearly distinct from cross-national comparisons. Second, focusing on phenomena within a single country allows many variables to be effectively controlled, as heterogeneity between different samples is relatively small. Therefore, these studies often treat macro-level variables—such as political systems, degree of democracy, and international resource prices—as micro-level constants. Third, they mainly explore micro-variables and the micro-mechanisms leading to the "economic resource curse"—such as negotiation processes, contract disclosure, transparency, agreement signing, auction design, regional technological innovation, and local administrative capacity—and use micro-level socio-economic data for analysis. Fourth, most propose policy recommendations for alleviating or avoiding the "economic resource curse" following their theoretical discussions.
At the macro level, pathological research on the "economic resource curse" is primarily concentrated in disciplines such as development economics, international economics, comparative political economy (CPE), and international political economy (IPE). As the most expansive branch at the macro level, research within the scope of development economics has conducted broad inquiries into the causes of the "economic resource curse" from perspectives including factor prices, crowding-out effects, debt levels, and degrees of inequality. Research within the field of international economics mainly analyzes the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" based on perspectives such as terms of trade and resource price volatility. Especially under open economy conditions, the impact of international terms of trade and commodity prices on national economic growth is extremely significant; research in international economics has provided a thorough exploration of this. Research in comparative political economy mostly focuses on variables such as rent-seeking, corruption, civil war, and the quality of domestic institutions to study the causes of the "economic resource curse." Generally speaking, research in CPE not only emphasizes these political variables but also focuses on discussing political processes. Research in international political economy integrates the variables of international economics and CPE, and thus, compared to the former, it focuses more on studying political processes, while compared to the latter, it emphasizes the analysis of how international trade, international migration, the globalization process, international reputation, and other global activities influence resource politics.
Taken as a whole, the aforementioned research discussing the causes of the "economic resource curse" at the macro level exhibits the following three characteristics: First, it focuses more on observing the empirical phenomenon of the "economic resource curse" at the sovereign state level and emphasizes providing cross-national empirical analyses. Second, because the differences between different countries are much larger than the differences between different regions within the same country, political systems, degrees of democracy, and international resource prices are treated as variables rather than constants. Third, it mainly explores macro-variables—such as the scale of public debt, degrees of inequality, international terms of trade, the level and stability of international resource prices, degrees of rent-seeking and corruption, civil war, domestic institutional quality, international migration, and transnational direct investment—and the macro-mechanisms through which they lead to the "economic resource curse."
IV. Political Science Explanations for the Generative Mechanisms of the "Economic Resource Curse"
At the macro level, the discussions of the "economic resource curse" in comparative political economy and international political economy constitute the main thread of pathological research on the subject. Within the scope of political science, the possible explanations for why the "economic resource curse" is generated include:
First, resource extraction easily triggers rent-seeking behavior [5]. Government regulation of the market and the existence of a quota economy inevitably give rise to rent-seeking, and rent-seeking—as well as rent-seeking competition—is essentially a waste of resources, thereby hindering the sustained economic growth of the state. Compared to other industries, rent-seeking behavior within the resource industry is more prevalent and rampant. The reasons are as follows: 1) Resources are often one of the industries where government intervention and regulation are most concentrated; the licensing, franchise approvals, and quota issuances involved in their extraction and export are all closely related to the government, which makes large-scale rent-seeking behavior objectively possible. 2) The resource economy is inherently monopolistic or oligopolistic in nature; resource companies, in order to obtain or consolidate their monopolistic or oligopolistic positions, have sufficient incentive to seek rents from the government. 3) The returns from resource extraction and export are immense, which causes resource companies to invest more costs in rent-seeking competition to secure rents. Therefore, although rent-seeking behavior inevitably exists in almost all industries in all countries, it is exceptionally severe in the resource industry and in countries dependent on it. Large-scale rent-seeking behavior within the resource industry not only wastes the resources invested by various resource enterprises in rent-seeking competition but also lowers the economic yield curve by distorting resource allocation. In fact, resource abundance increases the number of actors engaged in rent-seeking behavior while decreasing the number of actors engaged in productive activities. Based on a consideration of economic externalities, it can be observed that the economic growth effect brought by resource extraction is less than the economic drag effect generated by resource rent-seeking. The "Rent Cycling Theory" proposed by Richard Auty focuses on the differentiated incentives that different levels of rent provide to policymakers. According to this theory, the high rents brought by resource abundance encourage policymakers to implement erroneous policies that damage market efficiency in order to achieve personal enrichment, which in the long run will inevitably lead to economic collapse. In short, resource-exporting countries find it difficult to achieve economic growth due to the widespread presence of severe rent-seeking behavior.
Second, resource extraction easily breeds corruption. Although in practice rent-seeking and corruption often act as two sides of the same coin, they still need to be viewed distinctly in academic theory. While from a distributional perspective, neither rent-seeking nor corruption is conducive to economic growth, from a legal perspective, rent-seeking is not always an illegal act, but corruption is invariably illegal. Resource extraction breeds a large amount of corruption; for example, empirical research by Jing Vivian Zhan and others shows that as resource dependence increases, the corrupt tendencies of civil servants also rise significantly. Dong Baomin and others found a positive correlation between coal extraction and county-level corruption, while Fernanda Brollo and others similarly found at the municipal level that resource extraction triggered political corruption [6], thereby lowering the quality of mayoral candidates. In short, resource extraction induces corrupt behavior, and the more a country or region depends on resource extraction, the more severe its corruption phenomenon becomes. The channels through which resource extraction triggers corruption and affects economic growth vary: 1) Severe corruption significantly increases a country's political risk and allows civil servants to embezzle resource revenues; losses of billions of dollars are not uncommon. 2) Resource corruption "back-feeds" on resource extraction. Corruption caused by resource extraction leads resource companies and the government to jointly choose sub-optimal rather than optimal resource production models; therefore, resource production volumes are lower than they would be in the absence of corruption, ultimately affecting the extraction revenue of resource-producing countries. 3) Resource corruption has a comprehensive negative impact on national governance. For instance, it undermines resource management policies, reduces tax revenue, damages the ecological environment, erodes public trust in the government, exacerbates socio-economic inequality, undermines judicial justice, and lowers the government’s capacity for public service. These negative effects further impede economic growth.
Third, resource extraction easily triggers armed conflict. As a significant form of contemporary violent conflict, civil war has become a major factor influencing state-building, shaping social formations, and determining economic growth. Research by Paul Collier and others found that four factors, including resource abundance, determine the probability and duration of civil wars, and the more abundant the resources, the easier it is to lead to civil war. Building on this, subsequent research has extensively explored the mechanisms by which resource abundance induces civil war: 1) The "resource curse" brought by resource abundance reduces economic growth rates and public income levels, thereby lowering the opportunity cost of civil war. 2) The "resource curse" brought by resource abundance damages state institutions and erodes political systems; the weakening of state capacity and the decay of political institutions are more likely to lead to civil war. 3) Potential resource revenues greatly arouse the greed of local populations, separatist forces, and ethnic minorities, incentivizing them to launch armed struggles aimed at controlling resources. 4) Looting funds from resource companies or selling resources themselves to obtain revenue provides these groups with sufficient funding, thereby enabling them to resist the rule of the central government through force. 5) The geographic distribution of resources is also very important. When resources are mainly distributed in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, areas where conflicts have occurred for other reasons, or densely populated areas, resource extraction is more likely to lead to civil war or prolong its duration. 6) Issues such as environmental degradation, land requisition, and the gap between rich and poor caused by resource extraction intensify social contradictions or amplify historical grievances [7], thereby leading to violent resistance. Furthermore, resource abundance makes the outbreak of civil war more likely through various channels, such as influencing the interaction between the government and rebel forces, enticing other countries to intervene militarily, and providing "booty futures" for rebel forces to sell. In addition to civil war, resource abundance easily causes other forms of conflict. Regarding interstate wars, Jeff Colgan found that oil-exporting countries are more likely than non-oil-exporting countries to be involved in interstate wars because oil abundance provides autonomy for the aggressive moves of revolutionary governments, leading to more national resources being used for war preparations and warfare. Regarding terrorist attacks, resources provide high-value targets for terrorists and stimulate the "greed mindset" or "grievance mindset" of a few individuals, prompting them to join terrorist organizations; meanwhile, oil revenues are easily used to fund terrorist activities, making resource abundance more likely to bring about terrorist attacks. In short, although the specific mechanisms by which resource abundance leads to civil war or other forms of conflict are complex and manifold, it is certain that these conflicts inhibit productive activities, blur property rights boundaries, and reduce the labor force, thereby dragging down economic growth.
Fourth, resource extraction weakens domestic institutions. The view that "institutions matter" is indisputable, wherein benign institutions are an important foundation for economic growth, while malign institutions severely restrict it. Some negative effects of resource abundance destroy institutions or lower institutional quality, thereby affecting economic growth. The possible logic behind this is: resource abundance entices politicians to undermine institutions to obtain rents more easily; resource abundance leads to closed policy-making and unfair distribution, which hinders institutional improvement; resource abundance induces more frequent and violent conflict, thereby destroying the state's property rights system; and non-tax resource windfalls exacerbate principal-agent problems in politics and affect the operation of the political system by lowering the quality of political candidates. In short, the "economic resource curse" impairs institutional quality, and the reduction in institutional quality destroys the momentum of economic growth in multiple aspects. It is worth noting that, distinct from the aforementioned exploration of institutions in a general sense, some research focuses more specifically on the property rights systems of resource-exporting countries and their impact on economic growth. These studies can be categorized into two aspects: the strength of property rights protection and the types of property rights systems. Regarding the former, research by Ramón López et al. and Frederick van der Ploeg respectively shows that the clearer the definition of property rights and the more effective their protection, the less likely the "economic resource curse" is to occur; conversely, the negative externalities brought by unclear property rights lead to rising resource prices and a "greed mindset" that causes resources to be extracted prematurely and at an accelerated pace, resulting in a series of negative impacts. Regarding the latter, the groundbreaking research of Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal focuses on the ownership structure of resources and analyzes the impact of four different ownership structures on the economic growth of the five former Soviet republics that depend on resource exports. Their research indicates that the choice of ownership structure determines whether a resource-exporting country can escape the "economic resource curse."
Fifth, resource development weakens the state's capacity for resource mobilization. If sound institutions are one of the two main pillars for a state to achieve economic growth, then the other—perhaps even more critical—pillar is strong state capacity. The ability of the state to extract resources from society (also referred to as extractive capacity, fiscal capacity, etc.) is undoubtedly the most important component of state capacity and is vital to national economic growth. However, resource development undermines this capacity, subsequently impacting economic growth. For instance, Lu Lingyu and others have discussed how dependence on oil imports forces importing countries to do their utmost to expand their tax base, improve bureaucratic efficiency, and increase citizens’ willingness to pay taxes, thereby acquiring stronger resource mobilization capabilities. Conversely, it is not difficult to see that for resource-exporting countries, large-scale and sustained net resource exports shrink the tax base, decrease bureaucratic efficiency, and reduce citizens' willingness to pay taxes, thus damaging the state's mobilization capacity. It is worth noting that the "rentier effect" [8] is the core mechanism weakening the state's resource mobilization capacity. Mahdavy and Thad Dunning respectively define rentier states as "states that regularly receive substantial external rents" and "states where resource rents account for a large share of government revenue." The "rentier effect" generated by such states exhibits several pathological symptoms: on the one hand, as the government does not rely on taxation, it feels no need to be accountable to the public; in particular, because it does not rely on taxes from other industries, it reduces its support for their development. On the other hand, massive oil rents lead decision-makers to be short-sighted and complacent, lacking the incentive to improve economic policies or adopt developmentalist strategies. The "rentier effect" inflicts severe damage on the state's capacity for resource mobilization. Karl and others have observed that while countries like Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran received enormous resource rents, their taxation capacity declined significantly. Their research indicates this is because the profits from resource development and export are often so lucrative that the resource rents obtained by the government are extremely abundant. Since resource rents basically satisfy the government's fiscal needs, there is no need to rely on taxes paid by other industries. This seriously weakens the fiscal mobilization capacity of resource-exporting countries; their tax and other administrative agencies become unable to achieve effective management of economic affairs, ultimately harming national economic growth.
Sixth, resource exports tend to trigger "intertemporal dilemmas." Because the resource industry involves long investment cycles, large capital outlays, and high asset specificity, international investors are particularly concerned that governments might adopt different policies before and after investment activities; thus, the government's intertemporal commitment to international investors is especially important. However, research shows that resource-exporting countries generally face an "intertemporal dilemma." On the one hand, resource abundance distorts government incentives, making it more likely to tear up agreements signed with international resource companies; the resulting reputational loss undermines the willingness of other investors to participate. Even more seriously, governments of resource-abundant countries often conduct illegal expropriation or even nationalization of the assets of international resource companies, thereby severely damaging the country's international reputation. While joining multilateral international economic institutions and accepting their "hard constraints" can help a state signal to investors that it respects rules and values its reputation, resource-abundant countries show a marked lack of interest in joining such institutions in the fields of investment and trade. On the other hand, for the reasons mentioned above, international resource companies face higher transaction costs when cooperating with the governments of resource-exporting countries. Transaction costs can be divided into ex ante and ex post costs: the former refers to the costs incurred in drafting and concluding contracts and ensuring their performance; the latter refers to maladaptation costs, bargaining costs, establishment and running costs, and bonding costs. It is easy to see that due to the long investment cycles, large outlays, and high asset specificity—combined with the fact that resource exporters often have poor reputations and low transparency—the ex ante transaction costs of contracting with foreign firms are often very high. Similarly, because resource exporters are more likely to default, their ex post transaction costs are also higher than those of typical countries. Lu Siheng found that the high transaction costs in resource-exporting countries have a significant negative impact on their fiscal expansion and investment incentives. Other studies have respectively shown that high transaction costs create additional barriers for resource-abundant countries in attracting both direct and indirect investment. Integrating these two aspects, resource-exporting countries generally face a more pronounced "intertemporal dilemma."
V. Main Dilemmas and the Research Agenda
Within the field of political science, discussions on the mechanisms generating the "economic resource curse" are voluminous, providing many different explanations. Unfortunately, although the number of pathological studies on the "economic resource curse" has surged in recent years, the marginal intellectual contribution of this research has significantly decreased. Just as the growth rate of knowledge inevitably slows down according to regular patterns after a discipline enters the stage of "normal science," the innovation process in the pathology of the "economic resource curse" has objectively slowed due to increased research density. In reality, however, the more fundamental reason for this situation is that research in this field is mired in excessive empirical falsification and a serious neglect of theoretical boundaries.
At the empirical level, statistical analysis and data mining have become the primary channels for discovering new explanatory mechanisms for the "economic resource curse" in recent years. However, conclusions based on different data are often divergent or even contradictory, leading research in this field to increasingly degenerate into a "statistical game" of mutual falsification based on data. As Alexander James and others have criticized, many studies in this field are frequently plagued by poor data quality, endogeneity of variables, bias caused by omitted variables, and the low fidelity of proxy variables, which may lead to erroneous analyses of the causes and mechanisms of the "economic resource curse." Although recent "innovative findings" have challenged existing cognitions and explanatory mechanisms, empirical research based purely on data and models has turned the discussion of the "economic resource curse" into an increasingly inscrutable statistical game. More alarmingly, a pattern of refuting and falsifying other research in the same field based on one’s own data analysis has become prevalent. Because such studies often strictly follow research designs and pass multiple statistical tests, this reinforces the researchers' confidence while making it difficult for them to acknowledge or feel enthusiastic about anything other than falsifying dissenting views. A vast amount of meticulous empirical research has failed to create cumulative knowledge for the field; instead, it has brought only wave after wave of mutual falsification. This trend has caused the already relatively mature discussions in the field to exhibit a clear tendency toward fragmentation. On one hand, the obsession with falsification has severely squeezed out the review, tracing, and description of empirical phenomena in specific countries; on the other hand, it has left research on the "economic resource curse" that might yield breakthroughs through the lenses of anthropology or social psychology virtually untouched.
At the theoretical level, most studies exploring the mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" suffer from the problem of an infinite extension of the boundaries of their mechanical explanations. This is mainly because the independent variables focused on in this field of research often have a global and fundamental impact on a nation's economic growth, making it easy for researchers to unconsciously exaggerate the explanatory boundaries of these variables and their corresponding mechanisms. For example, institutional weakening is clearly treated as a "universal key" to explaining the causes of the "economic resource curse." Researchers easily attribute all causes of the "economic resource curse" to poor institutional quality or institutional fragility in resource-exporting countries, which evidently misallocates content that should be explained by other variables into the explanatory domain of institutions. In recent years, discussions regarding the boundaries or conditions of the mechanisms generating the "economic resource curse" have still not received due attention. This has objectively exacerbated the mutual falsification in empirical research among studies explaining different generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse."
Therefore, regarding the future research agenda for the "economic resource curse": on the one hand, what the field truly needs is not empirical research for the purpose of testing and falsification, but rather empirical analysis that uncovers the unique processes and logics by which individual resource-exporting countries fall into the "economic resource curse." If pathological research on the "economic resource curse" is to break out of the cycle of prolific but stagnant results, it must achieve a "return" in its research agenda. Whether it is the "return to neoclassicism" in economics, the recent "neoclassical wave" in realism within international relations, or the calls to "bring old institutionalism back in" within the international institutions research agenda, all suggest that the return of traditional paradigms and research agendas can often stimulate a new round of knowledge growth. Similarly, for the study of the "economic resource curse," the future research agenda should not be an endless empirical testing of existing variables and mechanisms, but rather a reclaiming of the traditional methods of descriptive analysis, a return to country-specific studies focused on individual resource exporters, and a rediscovery of observational horizons and theoretical perspectives that have been repeatedly ignored. In other words, by jumping out of the Popperian [9] fence of falsification and returning to the description of empirical phenomena for inductive analysis—discovering previously overlooked variables and mechanisms under the guidance of theory—we can more effectively promote greater progress in "economic resource curse" research.
On the other hand, future discussions on the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" need to emphasize the boundaries and conditions of these mechanisms. As stated above, no single mechanism is a "universal acid" for explaining why a country falls into the "economic resource curse"; therefore, while providing a theoretical explanation of a specific mechanism, researchers also need to specify the boundaries of its explanatory power. Furthermore, according to the classification by Ross and others, explanations for the generative mechanisms of the "economic resource curse" can be divided into conditional and unconditional explanations. Conditional explanations generally hold that resources, in combination with other specific factors, lead to the resource curse. When these other factors are effectively managed, resources themselves do not lead to an "economic resource curse." Unconditional explanations generally hold that the "economic resource curse" originates from resource development and export and the other negative effects extending from them. In other words, if a country is resource-abundant and vigorously develops and exports resources, it will inevitably fall into the "economic resource curse." Currently, the vast majority of research on the pathology of the "economic resource curse" still focuses excessively on unconditional explanations, with insufficient attention paid to conditional ones. In fact, the latter is more likely to foster theoretical breakthroughs. To this end, future research in the field needs to pay more attention to other concurrent factors related to resources and the mechanisms through which they jointly affect national economic growth.
VI. Conclusion
Within the scope of political science, the academic literature focusing on the "economic resource curse" has surged over the decades, becoming so voluminous that the task of reviewing and examining the progress and intellectual genealogy of its pathology has itself become an extremely important research undertaking. In a context where a large amount of research is mired in the fence of falsification and obsessed with empirical competition—failing to provide genuine academic increments—sorting out research progress, clarifying the intellectual genealogy, reflecting on dilemmas, and setting a research agenda are essential prerequisites for achieving breakthroughs. Consequently, scholars such as Ross and van der Ploeg, who focus on "economic resource curse" research, have long engaged in synthesizing the field's academic literature and progress, yielding significant results.
Based on this, this article strives to provide a detailed synthesis of the main progress and intellectual genealogy of the pathological research on the "economic resource curse." Compared to existing literature reviews, this article offers a significant improvement in terms of the number of works reviewed, disciplinary coverage, attention to recent literature, and the granularity of the synthesis, thereby providing a new shortcut for understanding and grasping the progress and genealogy of research in this field. However, as a review-based study, this article is by no means the end of the discussion on the relationship between resources and economic growth, but rather a beginning. Meta-analyses of existing statistical results and subsequent empirical research should be carried out by future studies.
(About the Author: Song Yiming, School of International Relations, Beijing Foreign Studies University) Web Editor: Tong Xin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 2, 2024.