It’s  a sad irony of economic development that many of the countries “blessed” with natural resources are also some of the poorest places on the planet, and also the most violent - the so-called natural resource curse. When oil (and coffee and wheat and other commodity) prices were going up over the past few years, these resources became even more valuable. Do we expect that would result in more or less conflict and violence in countries cursed with too much oil or fertile soil? And what will happen now that commodity prices have taken a sudden nosedive?

According to a recent study by Oeindrila Duba and Juan Vargas, it hinges on the labor intensity (the number of workers you need to extract or nurture the resource relative to the number of buildings and machines). We’ve given a more detailed description in a recent Slate column of why higher prices means less violence in places with labor intensive resources (like coffee and other agricultural commodities), but more violence in those with capital intensive resources (like diamonds and oil):

Will there be blood?

It’s also something we discuss in some detail in Chapters 5 and 6 of Economic Gangsters, based on Ted’s work on civil war in Africa and witch killings in Tanzania (among other things).

-Ray F.