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

To: Ish who wrote (97845)	5/10/2003 9:37:19 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oil flow starts, money comes in to the PEOPLE. Easy to say, but how exactly does this happen? The government isn't about to distribute oil income as dividends. The reality is that merely paying back the reconstruction costs is going to suck up all of Iraq's oil revenues for many years, and a lot of the money will go to pay off loans or leave the country as repatriated return on investment. All of that assumes that we don't see any substantial corruption in government - a rather large assumption. There is certainly going to be a large debate over whether the oil industry should be privatized or government-run, and it won't be an easy debate to manage. Oil money is not always a benefit, and there's a reason why oil-rich countries often have such lousy governments. We've gone over this a bit in the past: a single-product economy is not an easy thing to sustain, and is less conducive to free-market development than a mixed economy.