An awfully interesting post by Steve Coll just went up over at the New Yorker's Think Tank blog. Coll writes that he recently spent a week in the central African nation of Equatorial Guinea researching the country's new prosperity -- he says that they are "the only country in the world that appears to be immune from the global recession."
Equatorial Guinea's good fortune surely has much to do with the fact that the country, which Coll says was among the world's poorest just six years ago, discovered large oil reserves in the mid-90s. But the fact that China has invested heavily in the country doesn't hurt. Billions of dollars in grants and loans from the Chinese government have gone toward construction projects, many staffed by Chinese laborers. China gets to buy some of Equatorial Guinea's oil at a reduced price.
Along with the wealth has come a degree of political unrest.
Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has apparently survived multiple attempted coups; he himself took power in a 1979 coup that deposed Francisco Macas Nguema, the former dictator and Obiang's uncle. Obiang's presidency has also been marked with charges of human rights violations and, according to this 2004 BBC profile, a widening economic gap between the country's wealthy and its poor.
A great slide show at that New Yorker post suggests that some of that oil money has now begun to trickle down. Coll's piece will be one to look out for, and we'll certainly keep an eye on Equatorial Guinea as well.
categories: Oil Economy
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