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Oil discoveries can constitute a major positive and exogenous shock to economic activity, but the resource curse hypothesis would suggest they might also be detrimental to growth over the long run. This paper utilizes a new methodology for estimating growth underperformance to examine the extent to which discoveries depress the growth path of a country following a discovery and prior to production starting. The study finds causal evidence of a significant negative effect on short-run growth and growth relative to counterfactual forecast growth in countries with weak institutions, creating growth disappointments prior to private and public resource windfalls. This effect is termed the presource curse. For a giant oil or gas discovery in 1988-2010, the study estimates an average growth disappointment effect of 0.83 percentage points, measured as the average annual gap between forecast and actual growth over the five years following a discovery. Further, the estimated effect varies by the size of the discovery, increasing to a 1.77 percentage points gap in the case of super giant discoveries. The estimated effect is inversely related to the quality of political institutions, and driven by countries with lower institutional quality at the time of the discovery, consistent with the similar long-run results documented in the resource curse literature. For countries with below-threshold institutional quality, the growth disappointment effect is larger, measured as 1.35 percentage points in annual terms. There is no measured growth disappointment effect for countries with strong institutions. Using the synthetic control method, we confirm our findings for a selection of countries above and below the institutional quality threshold. The findings suggest that studies of the resource curse that focus only on the effects of resource exploitation or examine only long-run growth effects may overlook important short-run growth disappointments following discoveries, and the way countries respond to news shocks.

Economic Growth --- Forecast Errors --- Forecasting --- Institutions --- News Shocks --- Resource Curse

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The commodity price boom from 2004-2014 was a huge economic opportunity for African countries abundant in oil, gas and minerals. During this period their government revenues from resources grew by an average of 1.1 billion USD per year, and economic growth in those same resource-rich countries surged. GDP growth in resource-rich countries accelerated from 4.6% to 5.4% as countries entered a decade long period of sustained high commodity prices. Nonetheless, the paper traces a significant missed opportunity for resource-rich countries in Africa, with little to show for it in the post-boom period, which saw growth collapse far below pre-boom levels, to 2.7% per annum. This paper considers the record of performance during the boom (2004-2014) and subsequent bust from 2015 onwards. The paper describes four main outcomes of the boom: (1) measures of resource dependency rose in Sub-Saharan Africa during the boom, (2) the growth record was strong during the boom but collapsed once commodity prices fell, (3) poverty and inequality rose during the boom despite strong GDP growth, (4) resource-rich countries failed to diversify both their exports and their asset base, leaving them poorly prepared for the end of the boom and a period of lower commodity prices and subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. The conclusions are stark. During this golden decade of sustained high commodity prices and booming revenues, there was limited re-investment of those revenues into building sustainable assets for the future. In other words, countries consumed the boom, rather than successfully transformed their economies. The conclusion is that many resource-rich countries in the region squandered their "once in a generation" opportunity for economic transformation, offering policy lessons that may prove valuable as we enter a new period of elevated commodity prices.

Natural resources. --- Economic history.