Natural resources, women and corruption

Natural resources play an important role in the global policy debate among policymakers. This study shows how natural resource rent and share of women in parliament determine corruption level across countries using data of 141 countries from 1997 to 2018. The results indicate that natural resource rent will increase corruption level while the share of women in parliaments decreases corruption level across countries. Surprisingly, we find that countries with high natural resource rent can reduce their corruption level once they will increase the share of women in their parliaments. Our results are robust across countries using various subsamples and models and all models strongly support the hypotheses that raising women's share in parliaments reduces corruption level in natural resources. The results have important implications for policymakers to increase the share of women in their parliaments to improve the usage of natural resource rent in a proper way to reduce corruption.