L. Fituni, I. Abramova Resource Potential of Africa and Russia's ...

of other nations (manifest in an exchange rate), resulting in the nation's
other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to
buy, making the manufacturing sector less competitive. In the Russian
case, deindustrialization comes primarily not from the price
incompetitiveness for Russian manufactured goods, but because of
the steady elimination of manufacturing per se as a result of privatization
and the type of market economic reforms imposed on Russia
by the IMF, the World Bank and many western advisers to president
Yeltsin’s government in 1990s.
The African case is somewhat different, though the IMF, the
World Bank and western advisers played their ambiguous roles
too – through their “one-recipe-cures-all” policies of structural
adjustment, “aid-for-democracy” and “Washington consensus”
projects.
Though the basic tenets concerning the effects of the Dutch disease
are invariable, the effects in the African case may seem to be
not as spectacular as in the Russian case. We do not observe significant
and persistent shifts away from manufacturing on the Black
continent. But this is explained in many cases by the fact that the
sector itself was inexistent, in the first place. Still, macroeconomic
consequences for the future are similar, if not identical. Nations are
economically demotivated from diversifying and in particular from
developing and/or modernizing their manufacturing sectors.
However, no matter how hard-hit Africa and Russia are by the
Dutch syndrome, the situation will persist for years. Existing projections
predict, that inevitably for the time being and in the middle– to
long-term future. Their resource bases are heavily export oriented
and weakly integrated into the production cycle for domestic consumption.
Though their level of dependence on external markets
may somewhat change in the future, both Russia and Africa will
remain among the leading global suppliers of energy and mineral
raw materials for the world economy.
For the purposes of the analysis we shall speak about natural resources
in the narrow sense of the term. In other words, our study
covers not all the resources derived from the environment (nature)
but only about mineral and fuel commodities. We appreciate that a
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