نفت و توسعه اقتصادی: لیبی در دوران پس از قذافی

Libya experienced traumatic political and economic upheaval during 2011 arising from an eight-month-long civil war that cost thousands of lives, resulted in major economic dysfunction, destroyed part of the country's infrastructure, almost halted oil production, the country's major source of revenue generation and exports, as well as destroyed part of the sector's support infrastructure. While the civil war resulted in the ending of 42 years under Muammar Gaddafi rule, the economic legacy as represented by the costs of reconstruction efforts is enormous. While the freeing up of tens of billions of dollars of frozen assets may be the key to the country's short-term rehabilitation, longer-term reconstruction, growth and stability will fundamentally depend upon rehabilitating the country's oil sector. Interestingly, this rehabilitation will also have a wider global impact.

The oil-rich countries, many of which can be classified as developing, experienced substantially increased revenue as a result of increased oil prices during the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then after 2000. However, many natural resource-rich countries have achieved lower long-run economic growth rates when compared with non-natural resource producing and exporting economies (Auty, 2001, Sachs and Warner, 1995 and Sachs and Warner, 2001). This puzzling issue is described in the literature as the so-called “resource curse”2effect. This term was first coined by Auty (1993) to highlight the under-performance of resource abundant and extracting countries compared to non-resource abundant countries. Subsequent empirical studies confirmed an inverse correlation between economic growth and natural resource abundance among developing countries, but no obvious explanation for this finding has been found such as an important growth variable that is common in resource-poor countries but which is deficient in resource-abundant countries (Mikesell, 1997). For instance, the empirical study by Sachs and Warner (1995) found that countries with a high resource export to GDP ratio over the period 1971–89 experienced a poorer economic growth performance. They used a simple endogenous economic growth model to try and explain this relationship. This study stimulated further literature of both a theoretical and empirical nature that also confirmed the existence of under-performance in terms of economic growth, and which aimed to shed further explanatory light on this result such as Auty (2001, 2004), Auty and Mikesell (1998), Brückner (2010), Cai (2009), Manzano and Rigobon (2001), Mikesell (1997), Neumayer (2004), Rodríguez and Sachs (1999), Ross (1999), Sachs and Warner (2001), Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian (2003), Stijns (2001a) and van der Ploeg and Poelhekke (2009).3

The Libyan economy experienced dramatic political and economic upheaval in 2011. Critical to the country's future recovery from the devastation of the civil war is to rebuild the economy which will depend upon how rapidly the oil sector can be rehabilitated, but the duration of this process is currently uncertain. The impact of this recovery is, however, of significant contemporary importance to both the Libyan economy and the global economy more generally.