Note also, that having a resource-oriented economy tends to vastly overstate GDP. A dollar of exported crude oil counts as a dollar of "national income" but it's not income any more than selling off your furniture is income. You're just converting assets into cash. This phenomenon makes countries that derive their income from selling resources think they're richer than they really are.
But I think this is an oversimplification. Not all of the Arab world is resource cursed. Egypt, as an example, only gets 7% of its GDP from Oil and Gas. Agriculture accounts for almost 20%. (of course you could possibly argue that tourism is the resource that Egypt is cursed with)
One of the interesting things I've also read about the development of South Korea is that U.S. advisors pushed South Korea to develop its agribusiness, but this was rejected by the Park administration in favor of the export-driven focus because of the poor and highly variable economic performance of agriculture.
Basically you can feed people if you grow rice, but you can feed them twice as much if you sell cars.
I think more important is the early and strong rejection in South Korea of Communist and Socialist economic ideas in favor of growth oriented chrony-capitalist ones. Notable is that Korean conglomerates who went along with the government plan and met their economic targets were given tremendous leeway, while ones that didn't hit their targets or were against the government goals, were simply ripped apart and bankrupted.
The problem with the export driven economy is we can't all be net exporters. At some point your export driven economy will be undermined by neighbors with cheaper labor.
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This phenomenon has a name, the resource curse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse.
Note also, that having a resource-oriented economy tends to vastly overstate GDP. A dollar of exported crude oil counts as a dollar of "national income" but it's not income any more than selling off your furniture is income. You're just converting assets into cash. This phenomenon makes countries that derive their income from selling resources think they're richer than they really are.
But I think this is an oversimplification. Not all of the Arab world is resource cursed. Egypt, as an example, only gets 7% of its GDP from Oil and Gas. Agriculture accounts for almost 20%. (of course you could possibly argue that tourism is the resource that Egypt is cursed with)
One of the interesting things I've also read about the development of South Korea is that U.S. advisors pushed South Korea to develop its agribusiness, but this was rejected by the Park administration in favor of the export-driven focus because of the poor and highly variable economic performance of agriculture.
Basically you can feed people if you grow rice, but you can feed them twice as much if you sell cars.
I think more important is the early and strong rejection in South Korea of Communist and Socialist economic ideas in favor of growth oriented chrony-capitalist ones. Notable is that Korean conglomerates who went along with the government plan and met their economic targets were given tremendous leeway, while ones that didn't hit their targets or were against the government goals, were simply ripped apart and bankrupted.
The problem with the export driven economy is we can't all be net exporters. At some point your export driven economy will be undermined by neighbors with cheaper labor.