Oil, Other Scarcities, and the Poor Countries

Abstract

Classic, optimistic, post-World War II development strategy (whereunder the new states, catalyzed by temporary, modest injections of foreign aid, were to achieve accelerated growth, improved mass welfare, and national self-reliance) already was in trouble before it was overtaken by growing awareness of natural-resource scarcities. But, at least in their Limits-of-Growth version, the latter seem to challenge the strategy fundamentally. Six hypotheses for reconciling scarcities and development are: (1) world zero population growth needs urgent promotion; but (2) there is no comparable early need for arresting global economic growth; (3) the poor countries, along with more equity, need faster growth and therefore continuing regularized net transfers from the rich; (4) the rich, while sharing some of their growth dividends with the poor through scarcity-related market adjustments, will keep growing enough also to provide net transfers; (5) the oil crisis is so extreme a case of the problem that it confuses more than it teaches; (6) in a system that is still nation-state dominated, the mixture of cooperative and conflicted scenarios for promoting development in a context of scarcity may veer toward the former as affluent decision makers are “subverted” into planetary perspectives.