Research Data-Natural Resources and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Curse, Blessing, or Conditional Effect?

This dataset accompanies the research manuscript “Natural Resources and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Curse, Blessing, or Conditional Effect?” It contains the country-year observations used to examine the relationship between natural resource dependence and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with particular attention to the roles of armed conflict, investment, trade, human capital and institutional quality. The broader research project considers 48 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1980–2024. However, differences in data availability across indicators mean that the core econometric dataset comprises 1,330 country-year observations for 46 SSA countries covering 1985–2016. This represents the maximal common-overlap sample for the principal variables used in the empirical analysis. No missing observations have been artificially generated, interpolated or imputed. The dataset combines publicly available data from the World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI) and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The principal variables include: * GDP per capita growth (annual %); * total natural resource rents (% of GDP); * trade openness (% of GDP); * foreign direct investment net inflows (% of GDP); * state-based armed conflict; * conflict intensity; * one-sided violence; * government expenditure on education (% of GDP); and * CPIA transparency, accountability and corruption in the public sector rating. The workbook also contains derived variables used in the empirical analysis, including a resource-rich dummy identifying country-years in which natural resource rents equal or exceed 10% of GDP, lagged natural resource rents, and interaction terms between natural resource rents and conflict, education expenditure, and governance. The Excel workbook is organised into five worksheets: Analysis_Data, containing the country-year observations used for estimation; Codebook, providing variable definitions and sources; README, explaining the construction and scope of the dataset; Descriptive_Stats, reporting summary statistics; and Model_Results, containing results from the econometric specifications reported in the accompanying study. The empirical analysis employs two-way fixed-effects regression models with country and year effects and standard errors clustered at the country level. Robustness analyses include lagged natural resource rents, an alternative resource-rich classification, one-sided violence, winsorisation of extreme observations, and restricted education and governance specifications. Primary data sources World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI): World Bank Open Data Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset v25.1 and UCDP One-sided Violence Dataset v25.1: ucdp.uu.se