Considering institutional type: a varieties of capitalism approach to the economic growth resource curse

Defined by North (1994) as the “rules of the game”, over the last few decades, many scholars have sought to understand whether quality institutions can alleviate the Resource Curse (the idea that natural resource abundance hinders rather than promotes economic growth). However, with this focus on quality, few papers have addressed the question of institutional type, and its Curse mitigating properties. This paper, via utilising the associated data, contributes towards filling this gap. Using the Varieties of Capitalism framework, we test whether certain institutional typologies possess the ability to mitigate the Resource Curse and perhaps even turn it into a blessing. Specifically, Rougier and Combarnous’ cluster analysis, “The Diversity of Emerging Capitalisms in Developing Countries” (2017), whereby nations are assigned various institutional typologies is used to create our primary (dummy) independent variables of interest in this study. The remaining control variables essential for ...