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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ratan lal who wrote (8516)	11/1/2001 10:51:45 AM
From: Condor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Can you imagine the day that oil depletes from SA. they will have to go back to riding camels. They'll probably own 7% of the US by then. C

To: ratan lal who wrote (8516)	11/1/2001 11:22:44 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi ratan lal; Re: Saudi Arabia and all that oil... The oil is a curse to Saudi Arabia, not a blessing. They will never have any real advancement until they finish pumping that oil. Most of the OPEC oil producers would now be wealthier and more industrially advanced if they hadn't nationalized their oil fields, and instead had let the oil money flow right out of the countries and into the pockets of the British and US oil companies. The problem is that there are essentially zero examples of countries that advanced and became truly wealthy (like you said, the US is wealthy from "brain power", a lot of which it imported from abroad) while simultaneously having a world dominating export of a raw material. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of nations that had a world dominating export of a raw material that became temporarily wealthy but had a very hard time industrially developing themselves. The reason for this is that the high value of the oil exports makes it impossible for local, for instance, car makers to compete with imported cars. Labor costs are too high compared to import costs, and it is almost impossible to fix this. Part of the reason for the American civil war was disagreement over trade policy. The South wanted to export cotton and import cheap manufactured goods. If the whole US had been that way, the US wouldn't have been able to become a manufacturing giant. If I had to place bets on the industrial development of Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, I would put my money on Egypt and Pakistan to "place", and I wouldn't put any money on Saudi Arabia. -- Carl