Rich Mines, Poor Institutions: Resource Curse and the Origins of the Sicilian Mafia

Paolo Buonanno (1) , Ruben Durante (2) , Giovanni Prarolo

1 UniBg - Università degli Studi di Bergamo = University of Bergamo
2 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)

Under weak law-enforcement institutions, a positive shock to the value of natural resources can increase demand for private protection and opportunities for rent appropriation through extortion, ultimately favoring the emergence of mafia-type organizations specialized in such activities. Using a newly collected municipal level dataset, we test this hypothesis by investigating mafia’s emergence in XIX century Sicily, where a severe lack of state property-right enforcement coincided with a steep rise in international demand for sulfur, Sicily’s most valuable export commodity. Consistently with this hypothesis, we find robust evidence of significantly higher early mafia activity in municipalities with greater sulfur availability.

Mots clés: Resource Curse; Weak Institutions; Mafia-type Organizations

Domaines: Economies et finances

Paolo Buonanno, Ruben Durante, Giovanni Prarolo. Rich Mines, Poor Institutions: Resource Curse and the Origins of the Sicilian Mafia. 2013. ⟨hal-03460966⟩