BEIRUT, 27 June 2004 — Arab captains of industry and government officials stressed the lack of investment in their countries and called for a greater private sector role to counter state dominance at a two-day conference here.
“Political and legal obstacles are blocking the influx of the necessary capital into the region,” Faisal Al-Ayyar, managing director of Kuwait Projects Co. (Holding), said at the 10th Arab Investment and Capital Markets Conference.
In the first instance, he said, Arab states should concentrate on developing the required infrastructures in order to attract foreign investment.
Hussein Al-Nowais, head of Emirates Holdings, stressed that political stability and transparency were essential to entice investors.
Khaled Janahi, a member of Bahrain’s Economic Development Board, urged vital reforms to bring in some of the $1.5 trillion invested outside the region. “The Arab world must be able to create 80 million jobs in the years to come,” he warned.
Saad Barak, boss of the Kuwait-based telecommunications firm MTC, rapped Arab countries for continuing to implement economic policies that had failed in the former communist bloc and making only weak attempts to liberalize their economies.
Mohamed Ali Al-Abbar, chairman of Emirates property giant Emaar, urged governments to “be aware of the harmful consequences of not liberalizing and not improving growth rates.”
“We must not concentrate our efforts on marginal corrections,” he said. “The countries of the region must buckle down to introducing comprehensive reforms, developing capital markets and the banking sector, reducing the weight of the state in the economy and privatizing in order to attract foreign investments,” he said.
Abbar said a host of potential investors were ready to place their capital in the Arab world but were dissuaded by complex obstacles, including the lack of a proper legal framework. Iraq’s interim Finance Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi said investments in his country were linked to a return to domestic peace, but hoped they would be sizeable once democracy was established there.
More than 1,000 mainly Arab businessmen, government officials and international financial experts took part in the conference which ended late Friday.
In his opening speech, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a millionaire property developer, called on Arab states to follow the example of the European Union by launching a common regional market.
Lamenting the divisions in the Arab world, Lebanon’s prime minister urged Arab nations to follow Europe’s lead and band together in a common market to face future challenges, such as unemployment. Hariri said the idea of an Arab common market is as old as the idea of the European Common Market.