The curse of natural resources: an empirical analysis of European regions

The paper investigates the existence of a natural resource curse, from a within-country perspective. This perspective tends to be overlooked in the existing literature, which provides extensive country-level analyses of the issue. In particular, the paper examines the relationship between agriculture and mining and quarrying resources endowments and regional economic growth, over the period 2007–16, for 260 European Union regions. The results, which are robust to controlling for spatial dependence, show there is what can be called a natural resources curse, particularly related to agriculture. Importantly, they show that this curse is not related to the economic crisis and, in fact, has held back regional economic recovery.