How can a country recover after losing in just one year – the horribilis 2020 – 66% of GDP, the worst world performance? Yet Libya tries with the support of the West personified by the leader-symbol of Europe, Mario Draghi. The loss was calculated by the Monetary Fund (same debacle of 2011, the year of Gaddafi’s fall, which was followed by phases of growth). The World Bank is more generous and sets a decline of “only” 40%. Field assessment is difficult in a country off the radar of financial organizations.
The only certain data are the oil reserves (48 billion barrels, among the largest on the planet) and the centrality of the crude factor: for the World Bank it is 60% of the economy. On exports, it counts for 95%. The traumas of recent years have caused damage of over 150 billion euros: the production of crude oil had reached 90 million tons in 2010, then dropped to 21 million in 2016 and then climbed back to 50 million in 2019 only to be reduced by the civil war and, as if that weren’t enough, the pandemic that caused crude oil prices to drop from 60 to 17 dollars a barrel (only now it has recovered). For the World Bank in 2020, oil revenues were 23 billion dinars (5 billion euros), 40% of 2019 revenues. Yet another joke: being an OPEC country in theory “rich”, Libya has limited access to the emergency measures of the IMF and the World Bank. They guaranteed Somalia, for example, to cut the external debt from 5.7 billion to 557 million dollars.
Draghi in Tripoli: “The Italy-Libya partnership is a guide for the future”
by our correspondent Paolo Brera
Instability affects Italy as Eni is one of the first operators present. In recent months, the group has contributed to feverish restoration operations: the Zueitina marine terminal in Cyrenaica, the Bu Attifel fields that Haftar had sealed off, the El Fiil field in the southwest, the victim of a tribal feud, have been brought back into operation. . Production regained one million barrels per day (220,000 a year ago), of which 170,000 from Eni’s share.
“If we reach 1.1 million on average in 2021 and the prices hold up, Libya will hit the target of the budget law presented by the new government to Parliament,” said Federico Borsari, an ISPI analyst. “The budget is 111 billion dinars, 23 billion euros, in revenue for the year. Against this, 96 billion dinars are spent, 60% of which are destined for a plethoric public sector and generous subsidies. dinars (4 billion euros) are destined for development, and only a third of them concern the National Oil Company: help from the West is taken for granted “.
If Libya starts again, Confindustria calculates that no less than one billion exports are at stake, double the current total (almost all processing of refined and re-exported hydrocarbons): 346 million for industrial machinery, followed by food, chemicals and metals. But he also hopes fashion will be supplanted by cheap Chinese productions. Italian exports were 4 billion ten years ago, with an important share of infrastructures: Webuild, when it was still called Impregilo, built works such as the Benghazi sewer system still in operation or the congress building in Sirte, and had closed the contract for the “highway of peace” from Tunisia to Egypt. After that it was listed for the Koufra airport, a runway of the Tripoli one, other road works. Never started projects that can now be unlocked.
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