Blessing the curses? The relation between human capital endowment and the natural resource curse

Abstract

This research paper is issued from a quantitative study after a literature review of some researches about the natural resource curse. The object of this research is to study the links between the natural resource curse and the human capital endowment, which can be evaluated through the natural resource rent, the investment on education (Education expenditure), the real gross domestic product growth per capita and the human development index. These variables measure the economic growth and the social welfare, which leads a country to its own development. This research includes a worldwide analysis of these variables. However, we also explore the interaction of these variables in a specific country, in this case, Peru, which is not only a typical country that has many extracting economic activities, but also the country where this topic started to be studied, due to the paradoxical situation this country lives nowadays. We stablish that, in order to determine if a country has a curse or not (in that scenario, we say it exists a boon rather than a curse), we need to study more cultural and social variables that it were not possible to consider in the current research.