poverty attainments and income distribution changes to underline the heterogeneity of countries in our sample. The first classification includes countries with historically substantial natural resource rents, as a share of gross domestic product.<sup>23</sup> ROC economies are those above the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile of country observations of resource rents in the period 1970–2015. In contrast, NROC— or more-diversified—economies are those with smaller shares of natural resources. The second typology comprises economies in three sub-categories based on rates of growth of output per capita in recent decades. We define thresholds for GDP per capita growth rates using cross-country sample statistics between 1970 and 2014. These selected thresholds are the 30<sup>th</sup> and 70<sup>th</sup> percentiles of pooling all our country GDP per capita growth rates in the period 1970–2014.<sup>24</sup> TABLE 1. COUNTRY CATEGORIES

|**Category**|**Descriptor**|**Definition**<br>|**Country examples**|
|---|---|---|---|
|**ROCs**|Resource output-<br>oriented countries|R<sup>�</sup>≥pR70−15<br>90<br>|Algeria, Cameroon, Myanmar, and Venezuela.|
|**NROCs**|Non-resource output-<br>oriented countries|R<sup>�</sup>< pR70−15<br>90<br><br>|Argentina, Finland, Japan, and Vietnam|
|**LOGCs**|Low-output growth<br>countries|g�y≤py70−15<br>30<br>|Haiti, Madagascar, Niger, and Zimbabwe|
|**MOGCs**|Middle-output growth<br>countries|py70−15<br>30<br>< g�y≤py70−15<br>70<br>|Belgium, Ecuador, Nigeria, and Pakistan|
|**HOGCs**|High-output growth<br>countries|<br>g�y> py70−15<br>70|Bulgaria, Chile, China, and South Korea|

_Source:_ Penn World Table 9.0, World Development Indicators, United Nations, and the author’s estimates. _Note:_ R<sup>�</sup> denotes the median value of resource rents as a percentage of GDP over the period 1970–2015 pooling all country information. The median cross-country value of GDP per capita growth—in percent—over the period 1970–2014 is represented by . GDP per capita data in purchasing power parity (PPP) 2011 U.S. dollars. In practice, the selected percentiles of output per capita are rounded to 0 and 4, i.e., p30y70−15 ≈0, and p70y70−15 ≈4. The 90<sup>th</sup> percentile of the natural resource rents as a percentage of GDP is rounded to 7, gg�yy p90R70−15 ≈7. For robustness purposes, the estimates presented in the results section are tested varying the thresholds that define ROCs, NROCs, LOGCs, MOGCs, and HOGCs, i.e., varying p90R70−15, p30y70−15 and p70y70−15.

By combining both typologies, Figure 1 summarizes the median behavior of output per capita growth and natural resource rent shares across countries over the period 1970–2014 and 1970–2015. Figure 1 shows what some authors have already argued: some countries might look cursed, while others might appear to be blessed by having significant shares of natural resource

> 23 This paper follows the definition of natural resource rents used in World Bank (2017): natural resource rents are the sum of oil rents, natural gas rents, coal rents (hard and soft), mineral rents, and forest rents. For instance, natural gas rents are the difference between the value of natural gas production at regional prices and total production costs. 24 The thresholds that define these two country typologies are varied to test the robustness of our simulated outcomes as described in Subsection IV of the results (Section VI).

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