Explaining and Investigating the Relationship between the Abundance of Natural Resources and the Extent of Economic Corruption with an Emphasis on Oil and Gas Resources (A New Approach to the Resource Curse Phenomenon)

The curse of natural resources is an emerging phenomenon that is of interest to economic researchers. The attention of researchers is about the direct effects of resources on economic factors. The subjects of these researches are around axes such as the impact on growth, productivity, and production incentives. In the research conducted, special attention has been paid to how the abundance of resources affects macroeconomic factors such as the Dutch disease; but what is not considered is the investigation and analysis of the side effects of abundant resources on economic, social, and political indicators. One of the side effects of the abundance of resources can be its effect on the spread of economic corruption. In case of an abundance of natural resources, the potential for widespread corruption is created. This research was done in a descriptive and analytical way. It has investigated the relationship between the extent of economic corruption and the abundance of natural resources. To conduct this research, the statistics of selected developing countries in the period of 2000-2021 have been used. The information used in this research is the indicators of the perception of corruption, fuel export of countries, and economic freedom during the research period, which is from reliable sources such as the United Nations, Transparency International, and the Heritage Foundation. Multivariate panel data regression method with random effects has been used to estimate model parameters. The results of this research show that there is a negative and significant relationship between the corruption perception index and the fuel export index of selected countries, so that in the 95% confidence interval, the estimated coefficient of the independent variable is negative 0.01. For economic freedom, it is 0.07, which is in line with the results of other researches in this field. Therefore, it can be stated that the abundance of natural resources has a direct relationship with the extent of economic corruption.