The Impact Of Natural Resource Dependence On Regional Economic Growth

The general view is that a country or region with abundant natural resources has the opportunity to achieve rapid economic development.However,theoretical studies and facts show that the abundant natural resources usually have the negative effects on economic growth.If a country or region is over-reliant on natural resources,its economic growth will likely fall into the dilemma of "resource curse".In order to explore the influence mechanism of natural resource dependence on economic growth,this paper takes 256 prefecture-level cities(109 resource-based cities and 147 non-resource-based cities)in China as research objects,and makes an empirical analysis on the relationship between natural resource dependence and economic growth using panel data from 2003 to 2016.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Based on the fixed effect panel data model,the relationship between natural resources dependence and economic growth is preliminarily analyzed.The results show that at the level of prefecture-level cities across the country,nature resource dependence promotes regional economic development.However,the higher the resource dependence of resource-based urban areas is,the more suppression effect to the regional economic development will be.(2)On the basis of the threshold panel model,this paper discusses the impacts of natural resource dependence on economic growth under different levels of economic growth rates.It is found that natural resource dependence can help promote economic growth at a low level of economic growth rate,and thus produce a "gospel effect".When the economic growth rate is at a high level,natural resource dependence hinders economic growth,that is,it has a "curse effect".However,when the economic growth rate is at the moderate level,the impact of natural resource dependence on economic growth is insignificant.(3)The mediating effect model reveals that the adjustment of industrial diversification can significant affect the relationship between natural resource dependence and economic growth,and it manifests as a masking effect.Overall,the relationship between natural resources and economic growth is affected by the economic growth rate;meanwhile,natural resource dependence can affect the regional economic growth through crowding-out effect on the level of industrial diversification.Therefore,the influence of natural resource dependence on economic growth can be adjusted by the level of the industrial diversification during different economic growth periods,which has scientific theoretical guiding significance for the sustainable development of China's economy.