This thesis is a collection of three essays that examine the macroeconomic impact of natural resource windfalls and the microeconomic impact of Chinese development finance. The aim is to understand how fiscal windfalls largely driven by events in the world affect economic development. The first chapter studies the impact of commodity related income gains on the number of exporters and the average export value per exporter within the manufacturing sector. A large body of theoretical and empirical literature showed that these windfalls could be detrimental to the manufacturing sector, but none untangled the margins through which the exports from the manufacturing sector adjusts to these windfalls. I exploit the exogenous variation in the wind...