Battle for natural resources: Can countries like Angola gain profit from the oil appetite of the big economies like China and the USA?
Introduction
During the cold war it was nearly simple to understand where and why conflicts between different countries came up. The boarders of the bi-polar world were mostly set by touch points of communism and capitalism. Since the 1990s, when the iron curtain fell, the world changed rapidly. Nowadays it seems that potential conflicts between developed countries are not primarily subject of different political ideologies. Nowadays issues like trade, global environment, religion, terrorism and natural resources leading the global agendas.
In a world, where population growth annual is around 1.2% and world population surpassed in 2005 6.5bio. , global issues are becoming every day more important. Questions like, how the world can feed theirs needs for tomorrow come up. It looks like the race for securing access for natural resources could become a crucial one for all countries. The last decades mixed up the ‘old’ world order. With the emergence of Asian states, like China and India, new big players appear on the international floor of politics and economics. There is no doubt that, the ‘old’ industrialised states, like the countries of Western Europe or the United States of America (USA), overall benefited very much of the ongoing process of the globalisation. There is a flip side of the coin, the fast growing economies, like China, also increasing theirs wealth and this wealth calls for more natural resources to satisfy all the needs of the population. The supply of natural resources could play a key role in the growing process. Even the experts are not agreeing to one ‘most important’ resource, but most of them agree ...