Mining revenues and 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. Our estimations indicate that people living in mining regions have a sense of structural disadvantage in terms of the provision of public goods; however, this perception is pro-cyclical in the presence of revenue booms/busts. Our results hold even after taking into account the possible endogeneity of our measure of resource revenue.