Economic Assignment | College Homework Help
What were the drivers of the commodity boom of the 2000s and what have been its socio-economic impacts in mineral-rich regions of the Global South? Use examples from Latin America and /or Sub-saharan Africa and/or Asia to illustrate your answer
I have attached two power points that will help on your analysis and research on the certain topic.
Please use reading resources from the ones suggested and please make sure you show your sources of data, especially if you use tables and figures.
Introduction: The New Political Economy of Extraction
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Great mineral commodity boom of 2000 2011 drives new wave of extractive
expansion across Global South Latin America, South Asia and Sub Saharan
Africa key destinations
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Traditional mining centres (e.g. copper in Zambia) revived, but also expansion of
large scale mining into new areas with no tradition of extraction
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These 21 st century ‘mineral commodity frontiers’ typically rural in character,
comparatively marginal within national economies and often occupied by
‘indigenous’, ‘tribal’ or racially marginalised populations
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Fundamentally changes terms of their incorporation into global political
economy and sets in motion new dynamics of rural class formation novel
accumulation opportunities for local elites, but also large scale dispossession
and displacement of local populations typically expressed and fought out
through group struggles over rural property and authority, and control of mineral
revenues
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One of the myriad ways in which changes in one arena of the global political
economy (e.g. China’s industrialisation, financialisation) stimulate profound
socio economic transformations in another (e.g. ‘resource nationalism’,
reconfiguration of rural class relations in other regions of Global South) how
can we trace the interconnections?
Lecture Outline
1. The accumulation dynamics of the extractive industries
a closer look
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Condition 1: The resource imperative
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Condition 2: Global mobility
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Condition 3: Capital intensity
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Condition 4: Market volatility
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Condition 5: The State
2. The new political economy of
extraction tracing the connections
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Connection 1: The global resources boom
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Connection 2: The globalisation and financialisation of mining capital
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Connection 3: New questions of landed property
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Connection 4: New rural transformations: Latin America & Sub Saharan Africa
Two
big ideas from Dicken 2011
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The combination of the finite quantities , fixed locations
and territorial embeddedness of natural resources
‘creates the specific shape and developmental path of
the extractive industries’ i.e. it determines or
‘conditions’ their distinctive dynamics of accumulation.
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This also helps to ‘explain why the extractive industries are so
sensitive … [and] … the focus of such intense conflict and
bargaining between firms, between states, and between
firms and states’ i.e. the nature of the relationship between
the extractive industries and economic development in
different regions of the global political economy, and the
connections between them
Conditio
n 1: Finite resources, replacement imperative
Unlike agriculture, mining companies consume their
resource base during production a depleting asset
Compels them to continually seek out new sources of
supply they can’t sit still, always on the move
The replacement, growth & quality of reserves is a
central axis of competition ––‘race for
Demand for mineral commodities particularly sensitive
to general health of world economy and highly volatile
The long lead times & high sunk costs of new mine
developments = time lags between supply and demand
Since boom and bust is the way the extractive industries
works, risks are very high
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Central problem facing all resource holding states: how
to exploit their resources to achieve the maximum gain
when the costs of extracting them are so high.
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In the Global South, the development of local resource
industries has consequently been highly dependent on
outside investment i.e. on FDI.
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But raises a further problem: how to attract such
investment in a way that will maximize national
development.
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Conversely, central problem facing TNCs: how to access
these resources in ways that minimize their costs &
obligations to national territories in which embedded.
