Oil Revenue, Non-Oil Trade and Poverty Alleviation in Angola

This paper presents a brief overview of Angola’s international trade and the prospects for diversification on the export side as well as reactivation of traded goods production to replace the current near total reliance on imports for all consumer and producer goods. It is striking that trade policy per se is not the most important barrier to achieving these goals – rather, the most important are the poor state of infrastructure in the aftermath of the long civil war, the poor conditions for doing business, and the chronic problem of real exchange rate appreciation due to large inflows of oil and diamond receipts.