Conditions institutionnelles de la malédiction des ressources naturelles en Afrique sur les performances économiques

We show that if Africa is subject to the curse of natural resources it is because this continent has generally been organized since the European colonization on the basis of extractive institutions that determines the strong conflicts between the economic preferences of the political decision-makers and those of the rest of society. In particular, we show that the quality of institutions in African countries is fundamentally determined by historical factors. The main originality is that it uses as an instrumental variable, the institutional path dependence that ensures that there is a curse of natural resources only in countries where the extractive institutions of colonialism have been reproduced. We provide evidence that the overall impact of institutions and natural resource dependence on economic performance is critically dependent on past events as these determine the incentive structure and future institutional choices. The phenomenon of the curse is decreasing in Africa as we move away from the end of the Cold War