You may have wondered why commodity-based economies are not always advanced in development, despite the abundance of resources.

On the contrary, the concept of "Dutch disease" is often found in the economic literature, which indicates the problems inherent in commodity countries (including excessive dependence on raw material exports, which depresses the rest of the economy). The experience of the past years has shown that in such cases it is necessary to diversify the economy and expand the export basket of goods. However, it is important to determine which sectors of the economy will have the greatest impact on aggregate growth.

The example of advanced economies shows that, often, innovative sectors served their growth, but they were largely helped by the existing structure of the economy and the development of inter-industry relations. Thus, the steam engine and the Internet, at one time, were able to multiply the level of development of the Western world, thanks to the spread to related industries. In the case of commodity economies, on the contrary, the absence of "traditional" flows and the extreme isolation of commodity sectors do not allow to extend the effect of increased production to other industries.

The degree of dependence of the economy on growth in one sector can be estimated using multipliers (in this case, the Leontief I-type multiplier) - matrices of coefficients indicating the spread of demand (or production) in the final products of one sector to others.

The analysis of intersectoral relations of the Republic of Kazakhstan shows that the raw materials sectors - oil production (37th place), agriculture (39th place), etc.- do not bring a large multiplier effect to the economy (Fig.1). With the exception of refining of petroleum products and metal processing, the manufacturing sector dominates the leaders in terms of multiplicative effect (15 of the top 20 rating): they create the greatest direct and indirect demand for products from related industries. These observations resonate with the Concept of growth poles by François Perroux, which divides industries into three types: degrading (agriculture), isolated (commodity sectors), and fast-growing and generating a chain effect (manufacturing).

Thus, the structural transformation of the economy in favor of production in the manufacturing industry is appropriate. There is no doubt that the development of these sectors and enhancing advantages will gradually affect the structure of the export basket, but it is a matter of time and effort how soon it will consist of at least half (world level) of manufacturing products.