The Natural Resource Curse at the Regional Level? : The Case of Sweden

Abstract: The resource curse thesis states that countries with an abundance of natural resources tend to experience lower economic growth rates. However, does this theory apply also to the regional level? The purpose of this thesis is to both test the natural resources curse theory at the regional level in Sweden, as well to examine if different types of natural resource dependencies appear to have the same effect on regional income growth in the country. The methodological approach builds on an econometric (OLS) analysis using two different panel datasets over time intervals, 2000-2017 and 2007-2017, respectively. The results from one of the datasets suggest that the dependency on natural resources does not appear to affect Swedish counties' income growth, nor is there any difference in the impact on income growth from different types of natural resources. However, the corresponding results from the other dataset suggest a positive relationship, although these results are not robust across various model specifications.