Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Resources Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/resourpol Natural resources and economic growth in Africa: The role of institutional quality and human capital Oumarou Zallé Economics Department, Norbert Zongo University, 01 BP 1412 Ouaga 01, Burkina Faso ARTICLEINFO JEL: K22 J24 Q54 O15 Keywords: Curse of natural resources Institutions Human capital Economic growth ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to analyse the conditional effects of natural resource dependence on human capital and the quality of institutions on economic growth. Unlike most previous work, which only considers each of these interactive effects separately, this article combines the interactive effects between natural resources and in- stitutions on the one hand and natural resources and human capital on the other in the same model. To do this, we estimated an Autoregressive Distributed Lag model on a sample of 29 countries, in which there was an average level of dependency of 19.53% from 2000 to 2015. Considering the interaction between natural resources and institutional capital on the one hand and natural resourcesandhumancapitalontheothershowsthatthecoupehumancapital-corruptionisanappropriatelever to take advantage of natural resources in Africa countries. These results suggest that African countries must simultaneouslystrengtheninvestmentsinhumancapitalandfightagainstcorruptiontoturnthecurseofnatural resources into a blessing. 1. Introduction Sincethepioneeringworkof Auty(1993), SachsandWarner(1997) and Karl(1997) onthecurseofnaturalresources,theroleofgeography has continued to fuel debates about economic growth. These authors found that resource-rich countries had low economic growth compared with countries without such resources. Since then, the literature has continued to explore the explanatory factors for this phenomenon. Thus, a variety of economic, political, institutional and even environmental factors have been mobilized to explain this sensation (Robinson et al., 2006; John, 2011). The first group of studies finds that countries that have benefited from natural resources are those with high levels of human capital (Gylfason, 2001; LedermanandMaloney,2007).Asecondgroupbelievesthattheimpact of natural resources is conditioned by the quality of institutions (Mehlum et al., 2006b; Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian, 2008). How- ever, a third group believes that neither institutions nor human capital has a specific role in the resource curse (Sachs and Warner, 1997; ArezkiandvanderPloeg,2007).Infact,thereislittleconsensusonthe effect of natural resource richness on economic growth and the me- chanism underlying the effect. Indeed, through a Meta-Analyse of 43 studies, Havranek et al. (2016) found that about approximately 40% of empirical papers finding a negative effect, 40% finding no effect, and 20% finding a positive effect. However, the economic literature mainly identifies the two types of effects of natural resources on economic performance: a direct effect and an indirect effect. Indeed, the indirect effect would mainly operate through the quality of institutions and human capital. However, it should be noted that the different works on indirect effects only con- sidered these two channels individually. Thus, from the perspective of the theory of endogenous growth and institutional economics, it is appropriate to examine the effect of natural resources on growth by jointly integrating these two channels. Thus, how do natural resources stimulate economic growth? In other words, would the curse of natural resources not be a question of institutional adaptation and human capital? This article examines the conditional effects of natural resource dependence on human capital and the quality of institutions on eco- nomic growth in Africa. To do this, we use an Autoregressive Distributed Lag model that makes it possible to jointly analyse the di- rect and indirect effects of natural resource dependence on the eco- nomic growth of 29 countries, in which the average dependency level was 19.53% during the period 2000–2015. The main contribution of this article is firstly the simultaneous in- troduction into the analysis of the curse of natural resources, institu- tions and human capital as channels through which natural resources affectgrowth.Unlikemostpreviouswork,whichonlyconsiderseachof these interactive effects separately, this article combines the interactive https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2018.11.009 Received 31 July 2018; Received in revised form 18 October 2018; Accepted 13 November 2018 Resources Policy 62 (2019) 616–624 Available online 28 November 2018 0301-4207/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T E-mail address: ozallas@yahoo.com