Back in the sixties and seventies,the World Bank branded countries like Hong Kong, Singapore and Mauritius as "doomed" while African countries like Nigeria with high levels of natural ressources were branded as "possible success" story. To make a long story short, the idea was that you could plan "development". This growth and development would be fostered by high commodity prices. Nowadays, the World Bank has changed its discourse and - to its credit - become more focused and less rigid. Still, back in those days, the World Bank was basically saying that prices for copper would increase so much that countries like Zambia and Zaire (where copper accounted for 88 percent and 46 percent of exports)that they would be able to get the funds necessary to finance government spending and stimulate the economy. This never happened, real (and even nominal sometimes) commodity prices have a tendency to decline as economists Julian Simon(in The Ultimate Ressource) and Peter Bauer (Dissent on Development Economics) noted. The graph below illustrates nominal copper prices between 1970 and 1991 and in the broken lines, we see the World Bank's projections for prices. The advices of the World Bank often created misplaced optimism
A similar story is true for Cotton
And growth did follow fluctuations in prices - often negatively...
--
Source: Angus Deaton. 1999. Commodity Prices and Growth in Africa. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1999), pp. 23-40.
