Does The Natural Resources Lead To Official Corruption

The issue of economic growth and development has attracted wide attention and exploration of economists,that is,the source of growth.Natural resources or natural endowments are placed in a prominent position in many of the reasons that have been revealed.From the historical process of their economic development,natural resources occupy an irreplaceable position and play an important role in the development of the country,and the development weights of the countries and regions with abundant natural abundance are obvious.More than the poor countries of natural resources.For example,the Middle East with oil resources has created a lot of wealth with oil resources.But since 1980 s,more and more resources dependent countries have lagged behind the economic development and even retrogression.This strange phenomenon has struck the deep-rooted thought that the natural resources are beneficial to the development of the natural resources in the previous academic circles,and has aroused the deep thought of a large number of economic scientists.The economies of some developing countries with abundant resources did not achieve rapid economic growth and development as expected.On the contrary,from the long-term development of some countries or regions,the speed of developing countries with resource endowments is not as fast as that of the poor countries and regions,and the speed of development is even stagnant.In 2000,the world bank's data showed that only four countries(Indonesia,Malaysia,Thailand and Botswana)grew up to 4%(1970-1998)per capita in 65 countries with relatively abundant resources in the world(1970-1998),while some resource scarcity countries such as Hongkong and Singapore,such as China and Singapore,had increased the rate of economic growth.Most of the resource rich countries have passed.Coincidentally,this phenomenon also occurs in China.For example,the eastern part of the country with relatively poor resources is developing at a much faster pace than the natural resources rich central and western regions.In the face of this strange phenomenon,many economists question the traditional view of economic development,that is,the abundant natural resources can promote or suppress the rapid growth of the economy.In 1993,Auty proposed the concept of "Resource Curse" in the study of the economic development of resource dependent countries for the first time,that is,abundant resources would not have afavorable impact on the economic growth of some countries,but would become a restriction.The economic circle has followed up a large number of literature to explore the transmission mechanism behind the "resource curse",but the transmission mechanism of the "resource curse" has not formed a unified view.The academic circles have said that the mechanism is that natural resources have high economic rent and economic rents.The existence of gold causes the officials holding power to rent activities,thus causing corruption.It is well known that corruption has seriously damaged the public interest,has a bad influence on the social atmosphere and weakens the function of the government.It is the weakening of the system that leads to the "resource curse" effect.Based on the panel data of 2002-2014 years at the provincial level,this paper empirically tests whether the natural resources endowment of China will make corruption more serious by building a measurement model,that is,whether natural resources(especially coal resources)will lead to corruption.The empirical results show that there is a significant positive correlation between resource endowment and corruption.