Natural Resource Endowment, Human Capital Development, and Economic Growth in Selected African Countries

Policymakers, particularly in Africa, have continued to be preoccupied with the issue of the resource curse and how to address it. This study was conducted to investigate the moderating effect of human capital development in the resource-growth relationship in six chosen African countries from 1992 to 2019. Panels Corrected Standard Errors was used as the main estimator. The results confirm the Dutch disease by showing that natural resources had a negative impact on economic growth,while human capital had a beneficial influence. It was also shown that the development of human capital could not mitigate the detrimental impact of natural resources on economic growth. Hence, African countries should make efforts to reduce their dependence on natural resources and focus on the development of other sectors of the economy as a way to solve the problem of the resource curse.