Resumo (PT):
Abstract (EN):
Angolan agricultural and mining capital benefited from a long-lasting boom
until the mid 1950s but afterwards the world market of tropical commodities
changed and agricultural capitals entered into a trend of falling profit rates.
This paper tries to evaluate this fall and to describe how it was countered by
public policies. In fact, during the last two decades before 1974 the colonial
State implemented expenditure amounting to more than a 1 billion USD.
The State expenditure was funded by the taxation of mineral rents, mainly
coming from the diamond and oil sectors.
The local reinvestment of mineral rents, as the recent evolution of the petrostates
shows, was an exceptional historical experience. In late colonial
Angola capital accumulation came to depend on an increasingly smaller
number of rent-generating corporations (in fact, two) and so did the State
military expenditure, which included a colonial war budget. This situation
generated a political flaw: one of those corporations, Cabinda Gulf Oil, was
an affiliate of the Gulf Oil Corporation and the visibility of this association
led to a public campaign in the US led by a Congregationalist Church.
The campaign against the presence of Gulf in Angola was obviously not
successful. Still this model of rent-distributing could have hardly last in a capitalist world market and therefore it survived the United Church efforts
for only one year more.
Idioma:
Inglês
Tipo (Avaliação Docente):
Científica