Oceans Economy: A Comparative Assessment of African Countries’ Potential

At the current stage of development of international economic relations, the role of the ocean’s economy is increasing. The rational use of ocean resources will contribute to the economic development of the countries of the Global South and Russia in the 21st century. However, in the absence of statistics, comparative assessment of the oceans economy’s potential of different countries becomes difficult. Thus, the purpose of this article is to propose a path for such an assessment (for the case of African countries). Based on V. Podinovskiy’s theory of criteria importance and related methods, the authors’ methodology for assessing the Oceans Economy’s Potential (OEP) is proposed. The following OEP indicators are suggested based on the interpretation of the World Bank’s “economy size” indicators: total population; area of the exclusive economic zone and inland waters; and GDP of coastal area (the multiplication product of PPP GDP per capita by the number of people living within 10 km of the ocean coast). In the first stage, the comparison is based on absolute indicators; in the second stage, these were converted into scores. As a result, African countries with the highest OEP are defined: Egypt and South Africa have the highest first-order potential, and Madagascar, Mauritius, Nigeria, Seychelles and Tanzania have the highest second-order potential. The prospects for their cooperation with Russia are assessed. The proposed approach can be used for comparative assessments in different regions of the world. The possibility of using the proposed OEP assessment method for water treatment and purification projects is also noted, but the methodology can be refined for these purposes.