The Effect On Economic Growth Of Natural Resources Endowment: An Explanation With Entrepreneurs' Rent-seeking

As significant material foundation, the natural resource should contribute to regional economic growth. However, for a long time, the economic growth rate of the regions with abundant natural resource is generally lower than that of the regions with poor resource. This phenomenon is called "resource curse" by economist, which attracts much attention of domestic and foreign scholars.In china, natural resources are distributed much uneven, the central and western regions are rich in resources, most of the eastern coastal areas are limited in natural resources. But the reality of economic development is that central and western regions with abundant natural resources have poorer economic growth than those eastern coastal regions poor in natural resources. For this phenomenon, most existing researches explain our country's "resource curse" from deteriorating terms of trade, inadequate human capital investment, technology crowding-out effect, weakening of institutional quality etc., and with little regard for entrepreneurs'rent-seeking. Therefore, carefully examining our country's "resource curse" from new research angle of view, and exploring transmission mechanism of our country's "resource curse" is very necessary.Based on this idea, this article firstly defines the concept of entrepreneurs'rent-seeking, and analysis the motive of entrepreneurs'rent-seeking in resource-based area. On this basis, in order to discuss the effect on economic growth of an increase in natural resource, this article constructs an entrepreneurs' rent-seeking model including increasing returns to scale and rent-seeking behavior. The results show that higher endowment of natural resources lead to more rent-seeking activities of entrepreneurs, which hampers economic growth. Simply speaking, natural resource endowment affects economic growth through entrepreneurs' rent-seeking. Then, according to theory of mediation effects, this article establishes intermediary effects model to test empirically conclusions of theoretical model. Finally, with view to decision function of "resources curse" to entrepreneurs'rent-seeking, this article proposes relevant policy recommendations through reducing entrepreneurs'rent-seeking to ease the "resource curse". This research is not only develops the resources curse theory, but also has the important reference significance to formulate viable policy to our government.