Entrepreneurship and Natural Resource Curse on Regional Economic Resilience: Evidence From China

ABSTRACT This paper explores the impact of natural resource wealth on regional economic resilience and its transmission channels regarding entrepreneurship using prefecture‐level evidence from China. Our results demonstrate a natural resource curse on economic resilience, in that more resource‐rich regions have significantly less resistance to economic recessions. Furthermore, we present evidence that much of this curse operates through the channels of resource‐based economy that represses entrepreneurship. Additional suggestive evidence indicates a greater likelihood of resource‐rich regions being unenterprising localities, partly due to the highly standardized occupational structure and government‐corruption‐led deterioration of the institutional environment.