Happiness and the resource curse

Ali, Sabna, Murshed, Syed Mansoob and Papyrakis, Elissaios (2020) Happiness and the resource curse. Journal of Happiness Studies, 21 (2). 437–464. ISSN 1389-4978

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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.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: cross-country analysis,happiness,mining,resource curse,social sciences (miscellaneous),sdg 8 - decent work and economic growth ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3301
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Climate Change
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Globalisation and CSR
Related URLs:
Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 13 Jun 2019 11:30
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 17:47
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/71374
DOI: 10.1007/s10902-019-00080-3

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