One of the most studied hypotheses in the last decades within the economy of natural resources is “the resource curse”, which suggests that natural resource abundance leads to lower growth rates. This paper links the relationship of abundance and dependence of natural resources with economic growth and social welfare, considering also the institutional quality. The main findings are (i) the evidence against the resource curse, when we use a proxy variable of resource abundance different to that one used in several related works; in this study, this variable used by other authors, is treated as an endogenous variable and it measures resource dependence and (ii) the positive effect of natural resources on economic development, even though diffuse resources have a bigger effect than the point resources. The methods of estimation are 2SLS and 3SLS.