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136 CHAPTER 7 A ccording to the World Bank estimates, by 2025, global economic growth will predominantly be generated in emerging economies. By that time, six major emerging countries – Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation – will collectively account for more than half of all global growth. Several of these economies will collectively account for more than half of the global growth rate. In this new global economy, the centres of growth are distributed across both developed and emerging economies.1 Among BRICS countries economic progress, historically, has followed one of two paths. The first, which characterises economies such as China, India, and Russia, is one in which total factor productivity growth is a major contributor to economic growth. The second path, which has recently been common among the economies of Latin America and Southeast Asia, is one in which growth is led by the rapid mobilisation of factors of production . Out of all BRICS only Brazil (and in the 1970s to the1980s, partly RSA) has followed this path. South Africa has been a special case. Due to the international sanctions against the former apartheid regime, the country was forced to embrace elements of both ways, despite its abundant mineral resources and cheap African labour. Both groups of BRICS countries offers are expected to need more and more natural resources in order to reach their development goals and to adequately raise the standards of living of their population. Existing forecasts predict that the global demand for raw materials will rise by 50 to 60 per cent by the middle of the century.2 It is widely believed that the economic growth in such countries as China, India, and Brazil, even in the context of cyclical slumps in the world economy and significant price fluctuations, will contribute to an increase in fuel and raw material consumption. According to the estimates of the US Energy Information Administration, even if high liquid fuel prices are retained [the Russia, BRICS and the Global Supply Chain of Resources for Development Irina Abramova and Leonid Fituni 137 RUSSIA, BRICS AND THE GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN OF RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPMENT level reached in the first half of 2008], the consumption of liquid fuel types will increase to 99 million barrels a day by 2030 [in 2005, it amounted to 84 million barrels a day].3 The relative growth in importance of the ‘resources factor’ in the world economy and, as a consequence, in world politics, is graphically illustrated by comparing the figures of the Earth’s growing population and the extraction of the key types of natural resources. The number of people on the planet grew from 2.5 billion to 6.6 billion between 1960 and 2009 (by a factor of 2.64). However, this is disproportionate to oil production, which increased from 522 million to roughly 4,000 million tons (by a factor of 6.5), and gas production, which went from 190 billion to more than 3,000 billion cubic meters (by a factor of 15.8). This dramatic and disparate increase holds true for nearly all kinds of mineral resources.4 The growth in per capita use of most types of natural resources is more than likely to continue in the foreseeable future. Mineral resources are distributed very unevenly around the planet and as a rule their biggest users are not the countries in which they are found in abundance, but rather where mineral resources are scarce or not found at all. Increased competition for strategic resources causes extreme volatility at the commodity markets. Fundamental changes are taking place in the energy sector, which is related, inter alia, to the use of innovative technologies to develop hard-to-recover hydrocarbon reserves. At a time when it becomes increasingly important for the states to diversify their presence in the world markets in order to guarantee their economic security, we are witnessing imposition of various unjustified restrictions and other discriminatory measures. The growing depletion of natural resources is one of the true and fundamental reasons for the worsening of local, regional and global crises in the new millennium. The availability or lack of natural resources have direct effects on people’s living standards, state prospects for social and economic development, stability of the world economy and international security. The start of the current century has clearly shown that states act to secure control over the depleting natural resources which are in short supply . Quite often they would disguise that real motive...

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