The new fall outbreak of the pandemic caused by covid-19, both in Serbia and around the world, brings back fears of a large-scale disaster into our thinking about the economic future. There are many signs that professional managers of economic perspectives have these fears today - not only because of the threat of the terror of the coronavirus, but also because of the fact that something is changing significantly with regard to the development of the world economic structure and technological changes that will cause a new redistribution of capital and profits to The globe.
In this sense, I will cite just one example that haunts me these days, even though it is only about one piece of news that few people are paying attention to at the moment. It is the news that the famous multinational oil company Shell has announced a plan to shut down eight of its 14 oil refineries. So, if the managers of one Shell (headquartered in The Hague, with predominantly British-Dutch capital) estimate that they need to more than halve the capacities of their refineries, it is a reliable sign that the "oil era" in the world will end even before 2050, as was previously assessed. It is not just about the invasion of electric cars, but about the need to radically reduce costs.
So, if that Shell, which at one time was a global company with the largest profits and assets in the world (with around 93.000 employees and operations in over 100 countries), says - let's go for renewable and sustainable energies, move capital to new energy sources and technologies and in we are changing investment plans in that direction, then it resembles the well-known transition of business projections of the American tobacco industry from twenty years ago, when this powerful economic branch switched to food production.
Not so long ago, in the period between 2001 and 2008, when oil prices were increased from 30 to over 100 dollars per barrel, the famous American politician and analyst Henry Kissinger estimated that it was "the largest transfer of wealth in human history." For example, in 2008 alone, the well-known oil cartel of oil-exporting countries OPEC (without Russia and Norway) earned more than a thousand billion dollars from the sale of oil.
Now that the prices of crude oil are between 40 and 45 dollars per barrel and when it is difficult to forecast whether these prices will be even lower this winter, it is certain that the revenues of the oil exporting country will decrease by perhaps two thirds.
It is very likely that in the coming decades (and maybe even years) there will be a "new big transfer of world wealth" in another direction, and it is still difficult to predict how anyone will fare in that period. True, the "corona blow" on oil prices has already caused major economic difficulties in exporting countries this year. For example, the Russian ruble has lost its value against the basket of world currencies by about 20 percent this year alone, so there are already rumors in Moscow about a new denomination of that coin (the inclusion of the image of Crimea on the new 200 ruble banknote did not help). True, at the moment, the fall in the value of the ruble on the monetary lists suits the Kremlin itself, because it fictitiously increases state budget revenues (so the budget deficit has remained at five percent of GDP for the time being). Realistically, however, the decline in the country's export revenues must be reflected in the standard of Russian citizenship. Many Russian economists believe that all this is not primarily a consequence of covid-19, but an echo of President Putin's foreign policy, which is followed by American and European sanctions.
Russian problems are not yet clearly visible in the Muslim countries that are major oil exporters (from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to Indonesia and Nigeria), but the question is how these countries will manage after the "oil era" in world economic history. Will religious extremists and expansionists, with whom the world had many problems in the past decade (and still have them today), continue to grow stronger, or will those countries also embark on the arduous path of gradual economic growth? Which superpower will attract these countries to their side in global tensions? These are just two of the many questions that are not easy to answer today.
When it comes to Serbia's economic and development perspectives, it is obvious that some unchanging "policy of continuity" would be unrealistic and that new "directions of development" must be sought. Therefore, the question is not whether the director of a public company brought his associates to a meeting with the minister, but whether the politicians in power are able to change Serbia and its economic direction.
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