The economy will be heavily dependent on Oil for quite sometime. Literacy rates, health care statistics and poverty rates are abysmally low. All Petroleum export has to go through Sudanese pipelines and the Sudanese are ripping them off (charging $23 per barrel for pipeline transportation).
They are in talks with the Chinese to construct a pipeline moving through Uganda to Kenya (Chinese have already begun training Oil and Gas technicians). There seems to be quite a bit of potential for agric based industry - and once again, the Chinese seem to be the most interested.
South Sudan will simply move from being part of the Arab World to being part of the East African community.
Okay, thanks.
The Chinese involvement is...uhh...inscrutable. But it’s surely better than in the days when that involvement meant fomenting bloody Marxist revolution.