Impact of mining boom on the quality of public goods in Sub-Saharan Africa

In this paper, we investigate the impact of public mining revenues on perception indicators of public goods quality in five mining countries that have recently experienced a boom in their government revenues: Burkina Faso, Ghana, D.R. Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia. The effect of the tax revenue boom is identified using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. Our estimations indicate that people living in mining regions as having a sense of structural disadvantage in terms of the provision of public goods; however, this perception is pro-cyclical in the presence of resource booms/busts. Our results hold even after taking account of the possible endogeneity of our measure of resource revenue.