{"title":"Economic development and known natural resource endowment: Discovery rate differentials of oil","authors":"Jonas Hamang","doi":"10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103290","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The location of oil reserves plays an essential role in policymakers’ incentives to coordinate supply-side climate policy. In this paper I use data on the location of all historic onshore petroleum discoveries to establish a new stylized fact: Economically developed areas are many times more likely to contain an oil or gas discovery, compared to undeveloped areas. I show that this result is not driven reverse causality or confounding geology. By implication, there exist large additional undiscovered oil and gas deposits in currently undeveloped areas, mainly located outside of Europe and North America. I quantify these deposits to be about 40% of total discovered onshore oil reserves.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48418,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Development Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Development Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824000397","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The location of oil reserves plays an essential role in policymakers’ incentives to coordinate supply-side climate policy. In this paper I use data on the location of all historic onshore petroleum discoveries to establish a new stylized fact: Economically developed areas are many times more likely to contain an oil or gas discovery, compared to undeveloped areas. I show that this result is not driven reverse causality or confounding geology. By implication, there exist large additional undiscovered oil and gas deposits in currently undeveloped areas, mainly located outside of Europe and North America. I quantify these deposits to be about 40% of total discovered onshore oil reserves.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Development Economics publishes papers relating to all aspects of economic development - from immediate policy concerns to structural problems of underdevelopment. The emphasis is on quantitative or analytical work, which is relevant as well as intellectually stimulating.