Resource Curse’s Next Victim: Papua New Guinea?

VICTOR MENALDO

Papua New Guinea is a small island nation in the South Pacific (Oceania), a region of the world that contains 29 countries and dependent states covering approximately 9,000,000 sq km (3, 475,000 square miles), with a population of about 35.8 million.  It made news today when the NY Times reported today that Papua New Guinea could be the next victim of the so-called resource curse.
In 2014, ExxonMobil is scheduled to start shipping natural gas through a 450-mile pipeline, then on to Japan, China and other markets in East Asia. But the flood of revenue, which is expected to bring Papua New Guinea $30 billion over three decades and to more than double its gross domestic product, will force a country already beset by state corruption and bedeviled by a complex land tenure system to grapple with the kind of windfall that has paradoxically entrenched other poor, resource-rich nations in deeper poverty.
Let’s examine the claims made by the NY Times.
First, the Times claims that economic development in Papua New Guinea has been partially due to its increasing income from natural resources, especially natural gas.
Here in Tari — the largest town closest to the gas fields but really just a series of squat buildings surrounding a recently fenced-off airstrip — a separate tribal war has given way to new businesses.
“No one from the outside dared to come to Tari two years ago,” said Peter Muli, 37, whose chicken restaurant, House-Kai, is now thriving.
To see if this is indeed the case, above I graph the trajectory of Papua New Guinea’s economic development since independence in 1975, along with the trajectory of its income from natural resources (in Per Capita terms). The latter includes income from precious metals, natural gas and oil. In Papua New Guinea’s case, it is rich in copper, gold and natural gas, as the NY Times article pointed out. Both variables are from Haber and Menaldo (2010).
The NY Times seems to be onto something: GDP Per Capita and Natural Resources Income indeed move together over time, and both are tending to move upward.
But what about the claim that increased income from natural resources equals increased corruption?
Author Norimitsu Onishi hints at this in his article:
While conceding the danger of social disruptions, Papua New Guinea officials are adamant that the windfall will be used for development and not siphoned off by the well connected. Mr. O’Neill, the finance minister, said the government planned to channel the revenue into three sovereign wealth funds that would be overseen by a board of advisers, including foreigners, adding that the government would also be held accountable by the World Bank and other creditors.
But Michael McWalter, a former director of the petroleum division at the Department of Petroleum and Energy and a current adviser, said that corruption permeated the country’s political establishment and bureaucracy.
“Whether they will put the money into a revenue fund and steal it all in one go, I don’t know,” said Mr. McWalter, who is also a director of Transparency International here.
Should we really have grounds to fear that increased income from natural gas will stimulate increased corruption in Papua New Guinea? In order to make an educated guess, we can again turn to the history of Papua New Guinea.  Particularly, we can graph its level of “corruption”, or a close proxy, and its income from natural resources.
The ICRG Indicator of the Quality of Government is the average of three sub-indices: the “Corruption,” “Law and Order,” and “Bureaucracy” indexes. Each is based on subjective perceptions about the prevalence of corruption in the public sector, how professional the bureaucracy is, and respect for the rule of law. While each of these components is measured on a 6 point scale, the ICRG index is normalized to run from 0 to 1, with 1 denoting the best institutions.
As we can see from the graph above, Papua New Guinea’s quality of government declines for the first time, from a high of 6.4 to 5.8, in the wake of a big fall in the country’s income from natural resources—a nearly 33% drop in 1989. This was due to the closure of the Bougainville copper mine and was the direct result of a local insurrection in that region. In other words, corruption was on the rise only AFTER income from natural resources plummeted.  The same type of story recurs between 1996 and 2001: Papua New Guinea’s quality of government falls, and conversely corruption increases, only AFTER a massive fall in its income from natural resources due to a collapse in copper prices. In 1993 Papua New Guinea’s income from natural resources reaches a peak of $624, only to plummet over the next few years, eventually reaching a through of only $288 in 2002.
In short, increases in corruption over Papua New Guinea’s recent history appear correlated with decreases in income from natural resources. Not the other way around.
Of course, visual correlation does not equal causation.  First of all, we are not controlling for any common trends in the data, nor serial correlation. Therefore, that is what I do below: I run a regression that includes a linear time trend and addresses serial correlation via a Newey West adjustment to the residuals.
The coefficient on Total Resources Per Capita is, as opposed to the fears of the NY Times article, positive and highly statistically significant! The magnitude of the coefficient is not great, however: an increase of $1000 in resource income per capita only induces a .23 increase in the ICRG Index.  In other words, increased reliance on natural resources REDUCES corruption.
Of course, these results are still not tantamount to causation, since I have not controlled for time-varying factors that may possible confound the relationship.
Below I control for Per Capita Income:
The positive relationship weakens, to be sure, but is still present.
I hasten to emphasize that this result is still not tantamount to causation.  I have not addressed the fact that:
  • Increased government effectiveness could lead to increased reliance on resources.
  • There are several factors that drive government effectiveness that have been omitted from the model and that could be correlated with Natural Resource Income.
  • The data may be non-stationary.
  • The relationship between natural resource reliance and corruption may be non-linear.
However, it is highly unlikely that the relationship between natural resource reliance and corruption over Papua New Guinea’s history is negative, as intimated by the NY TIMES.  What is more likely is that there is no systematic relationship, or that the relationship is positive but weak.
Finally, I should also note that throughout its short history as a sovereign state, Papua New Guinea has remained highly democratic, despite increasing reliance on natural resources.
So, you be the judge: are natural resources a curse or a blessing to the people of New Guinea?

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