Sahraaltı Afrika bölgesinde doğal kaynaklar ve ekonomik büyüme: Kaynak laneti

Sub Saharan Africa is highly endowed with natural resources but its economic performance has always been poor and disappointing over the years, however the data shows significant economic improvement in the region from the beginning of the 21st century onward. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of natural resource abundance on economic growth in SSA and whether the resource curse has been reversed or not in recent years by econometric analysis using panel data for twenty one SSA countries for the 1980-2016 period. The model of our study uses, economic growth for economic performance as the dependent variable, resource abundance, degree of trade openness, domestic investments, foreign direct investments (FDI), annual population growth rate and civil war (dummy) are used as independent variables. In order to examine the reversal of the curse in the region from 2000 onward, we first have to show the presence of the curse at the first place and that's why we decompose the time into sub periods of 1980-2000 and 2000-2016 in order to capture the impact of natural resource abundance in each sub period and observe any structural changes that led to this improvement of economic performance over the years. Furthermore, the improvement of economic performance in SSA from 2000 onward indicates the structural changes in the region and to determine these changes we use aggregate and disaggregate GDP and we decompose the disaggregate GDP into three main sectors which are, agricultural sector, industrial sector and services sector and understand how each sector is affected by the presence of resource abundance in SSA. The findings of this study show that the resource abundance has a negative impact on the economic growth for the 1980-2000 period suggesting the presence of resource curse in this period. However, the results also show the positive relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth for 2000-2016 period and in addition to that our findings indicates that industrial sector is positive related to the economic growth and this is because foreign direct investments (FDI) have been investing heavily in manufacturing sector and now the raw materials and other natural resources are used within the region instead of being exported and that's why they have been contributing positively to the economic growth in recent years. The sign of the sectoral changes in the region is the indication of the reversal of the curse from the beginning of 21st century in SSA. Overall the presence of natural resource abundance in this region has not been an important factor to the economic growth like one would expect but we expect this to change in the near future because of the signs of the curse reversal, new economic diversifications policies and new agreements like AfCFTA and the use monetary union like ECO.