NCID Resident Fellow Alex Armand presented last 14th June at the Barcelona GSE Summer Forum. Armand presented the paper Does Information Break the Political Resource Curse? Experimental Evidence from Mozambique, written jointly with Alexander Coutts, Pedro C. Vicente and Ines Vilela.

The investigation adresses the political resource curse, which is the idea that natural resources can lead to the deterioration of public policies through corruption and rent-seeking by those closest to political power. One prominent consequence is the emergence of conflict. This paper takes this theory to the data for the case of Mozambique, where a substantial discovery of natural gas recently took place. It uses two experiments: one with information targeting only local political leaders, the other with information and deliberation activities targeting communities at large. The first shows it doesn't reduce the political resource curse, but results on the second show a significant change.

The Barcelona GSE Summer Forum workshop is jointly organized by the Barcelona GSE, the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) and the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI). It aims at creating an annual European meeting of top researchers in political economy.