How the country’s natural resource abundance affects the industrial growth? We argue that one of the transmission mechanisms is via the distorting effect of resources on the distribution of country’s human capital, namely under-accumulation of country's high skilled human-capital. In particular, we empirically investigate whether link between country’s natural resource endowment and industry-level growth depends on industry’s human-capital requirement.  We show that in the 1980s and the 1990s, industrial sectors that are high-skilled labor intensive develo­ped disproportionately slowly in countries with higher contribution of natural resource sectors to GDP. At the same time low-skilled labor intensity did not differenti ate industrial growth between resource-rich and resource-poor countries. Our findings are in line with the theoretical argument that deteriorative effect of natural resources on the development of industrial sector is a byproduct of the capital accumulation process in the resource abundant open economy that slows down the development of margin ally high-skilled labor force compared to the resource-poor economies.