Resource Rents, Human Development and Economic Growth in Sudan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents timeseries analysis on the relationships between GDP, human development measures and rents from natural resources for Sudan spanning 46 years of data. The paper relates its findings to a literature on the resource curse, to which it presents a good introduction. In my opinion, the paper would benefit from elaboration on the interpretation and limitation of the analysis and should be more careful with claims about causality.

See below some more specific remarks:

line 120 a head --> ahead

line 205 to me unclear what was meant with forming the circle

line 280-292 Could use elaboration on the sources of the data for the different variables, also with respect to completeness

Figure 2 can be presented more attractively with information on the axis.

line 395 "the study finds evidences that natural resource rents inflict negative effects on economic growth..." Apart from the minor spelling mistake, the language needs to be more careful on causality. Omitted variables may still be responsible for the How does / Can this study account for influences of price fluctuations, include regime dummies, and possibly, include proxies for violent conflict or natural disasters? 

line 404 "A causal... ... but none of them is significant"

line 426 rule of low -> law

Author Response

Please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

The primary contribution of this research is to provide empirical work on the resource curse in a developing country, Sudan.  The methodology used by the authors is appropriate and well presented generally. Here are my suggestions for improving the manuscript.

1. I recommend that the model presented at the end of the literature review be placed into a separate section and not included at the end of the section. 
2. The introduction has an extensive set of references that makes it read more like the literature review and the research objective gets lost.  I suggest a shorter and more focused introduction clearly stating the objective of the research.  This is particularly important since there are already many studies on the resource curse it is important to clearly lay out the contribution to the literature of the current work.  The statement of the objective is most clearly laid out on page 5, lines 240-42.
3. Lines 330 and 331 are missing some symbols.
4. Some clarity of exposition can be found in the example on lines 350-1, page 10: "...TRR is found to negatively cause education but not significantly, however, TRR is found to be highly positively and significantly causing life expectancy at birth".  Some additional discussion of the interpretation of results would be helpful to improve the contribution of the research.
5. The area of the paper that I would like to see significantly improved is the Discussion section.  The discussion seems to focus on the signs only, with significant attention paid to insignificant results.  I would be more interested in what the research results mean for policy.  Just knowing the signs and whether or not they are statistically significant isn't enough.  Is Sudan just another example of poor institutions and corruption leading to the RC and DD problems?  What are the lessons for other countries that are resource rich?  Perhaps a policy section would be appropriate.

Finally, the references need to be checked and fixed.  There are a number of differences between what is cited in the manuscript and what is listed in the references.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc