Revisiting the Nexus of Financialization and Natural Resource Abundance in Resource-Rich Countries: New Empirical Evidence from Nine Indices of Financial Development

Abstract

A great number of studies in the literature that estimates the impact of natural resource abundance on financial development proxies financialization with either domestic credit to the private sector or market capitalization of domestic companies. However, these proxies do not fully respond to the complicated structure of financial development. To fill the gaps in the existing literature, nine indices of financial development proposed by IMF are used in the links with natural resource abundance in resource-rich countries for the years 1980-2017. This study reveals reliable and robust empirical results by employing both traditional and second-generation econometric techniques for the dataset. First, the financial resource curse hypothesis is confirmed for the panel of resource-rich economies because natural resources have negative effects on each of the nine indices. Second, the negative impact of the abundance of natural resources on financialization decreases towards high quantile levels. Last, natural resource abundance has a greater negative impact on financial markets than financial institutions when indices of financial markets are compared to indices of financial institutions. Policy implications are further discussed in this study.