August 18, 2009
Many settler capitalist economies have had their economies based on a single or multiple set of 'primary' or resource industries, ranging from the US (North 1961), to Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Norway and many still do so, including oil-reliant states in the middle east and central Asia and mineral-reliant ones in Africa. Some of these countries have evolved from a staples base to a manufacturing or service one, but others have not, or have only partially done so.
Originally, the staples thesis, as developed by Canadian political economists, set out an export-led model of economic growth and attempted to how regional natural resource endowments led to the autonomous demands for and dependence upon exports, their spreading effects (linkages) to the rest of the economy, and to technological changes. Staples theorists view Canadian political economy as having been shaped by the export of successive staples over the course of Canadian history from the earliest colonial times to the modern era.
Michael Howlett and Keith Brownsey in Canadian Political Science Review say that:
While a mature staples political economy may still be characterized as "resource dependent", the economy is more diffused and diversified than in the past... , if this diffusion, diversification, and resource depletion continues, then an economy may make a further transition towards a "post-staples" one in which severe pressures on the critical resource sector coupled with the prospect of even more substantial contractions in the near future lead to an internal reconfiguration of growth and development as unprocessed bulk commodities can no longer compete with low-cost suppliers in traditional export markets. Typically this would involve a significant increase in metropolitan shares of population and employment, the emergence of regional economic centres, the decline of smaller resource-dependent communities and the increased prominence of the internal market for remaining, smaller-scale, resource industries
On this account Australia, like Canada, is a mature staples economy. In The (Post) Staples Economy and the (Post) Staples State in Historical Perspective Adam Wellstead argues that the staple thesis was that this form of economic life could provide relatively high standards of living to citizens of exporting countries, but only as long as domestic resource supplies and world demand remained constant or increased. Any declines in demand or increases in supplies would have drastic consequences for the domestic political economy, which would be poorly placed to respond to the challenge of finding a new economic base. The ‘staples trap’; is where the country becomes dependent on the economies that receive its imports and supply its manufactured goods.
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