Is there any resource curse in education and health sector?

Whether natural resource has positive or negative effect on social development indicator has been a long-standing debate between economists. Existing studies shows the mixed results with their own justification. I contribute to this topic by examining the effect of natural resource dependence on some health and education outcomes utilizing a large sample of Indonesian district’s data from 2007-2017. The empirical result indicates that there is positive and significant correlation between the mining rent per capita and the net enrolment ratio of senior secondary school, health expenditure and the percentage of birth attended by a skilled health labor. Even though the result is less robust, the mining rent per capita also has positive correlation with literacy rate, immunization rate and life expectancy (old method). The correlation between the share of people employed in mining and quarrying sector and the literacy rate are positive and significant. The government revenue dependences also almost do not have a robust correlation with education and health outcomes, except for negative correlation between oil revenue and life expectancy 2010-2017.Overall, I can conclude that the resource dependence in Indonesia mostly support education and health outcomes. The possible transmission channel on how natural resource dependence may affect education and health outcomes come from income, inequality and government institutional quality proxy. However, there is possibility of other transmission channel that is a little difficult to measure in district level due to the unavailability of the data such as, pollution and child labor. Extension of my study can take those variables into account and scrutinize more on the possibility of other transmission channel mechanisms.