The Natural Resource Curse, Fiscal Decentralization, And Agglomeration Economies

Natural resource abundance is a blessing for some countries, yet is a curse for others. The degree of fiscal decentralization may account for this divergent outcome. Resources tend to locate in remote, non-agglomerated, and sparsely populated areas; a high degree of fiscal decentralization gives a resource abundant region an advantage in the inter-regional tax competition over capital so that it attracts some capital from agglomerated and densely populated regions. Given a sufficiently high agglomeration level, any such movement of capital would bring a loss of output in the agglomerated region that outweighs the sum of gains from resource income and increased output in the remote region - so that aggregate product in the economy drops.