  This paper reexamines the validity of the natural resource curse hypothesis,
using the database of mineral exporting countries. Our findings are as follows:
(i) Resource-rich countries (RRCs) do not necessarily exhibit poor political,
economic and social performance; (ii) RRCs that perform poorly have a low
diversified exports portfolio; (iii) In contrast, RRCs with a low diversified
exports portfolio do not necessarily perform poorly. Then, we develop a model
of strategic interaction from a Bayesian game setup to study the role of
leadership and governance in the management of natural resources. We show that
an improvement in the leadership-governance binomial helps to discipline the
behavior of lobby groups (theorem 1) and generate a Pareto improvement in the
management of natural resources (theorem 2). Evidence from the World Bank
Group's CPIA data confirms the later finding. Our results remain valid after
some robustness checks.
