Raiding the Honey Pot: The Resource Curse and Weak Institutions at the Project Level
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the macroeconomics and political science literature, the natural resource curse hypothesis conditionally connects national dependence on natural resource revenues to both slow economic growth in the non-resource sectors and a lower quality of democratic institutions. Anthropologically oriented research on the cultures and communities where resources extraction occurs has documented a wider range of problems. This paper derives local-level predictions from the macro-level literature and checks their accuracy in the case of a gold mine on a Melanesian island in Papua New Guinea. Predictions of corruption and rent seeking were confirmed, but contrary to some conditional predictions, the local democratic institutions appeared to strengthen. The mining company’s policies temporarily restrained rent seeking and corruption but both returned as closure neared and the company reduced its presence. The findings largely support the insight from anthropological research that local communities take an active role in both resisting and promoting resource curse dynamics. Noting several recommended curse-reducing measures at the national level, the discussion articulates gaps in our knowledge about how resource extraction companies can restrain the curse locally.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".