DUBAI, 15 December 2004 — UAE Minister of Economy and Planning Sheikha Lubna Al-Qasimi yesterday cited India as a model for development and economic prosperity for the Arab countries while an international expert predicted that there will be 36 million people unemployed in the Arab World by 2020.

Sheikha Lubna, the UAE’s first woman minister, was addressing a session of the three-day Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai that opened on Monday. The forum aims at looking where the Arab World would be in the year 2020.

“We can learn (from India),” she said. “It has achieved high economic growth despite problems like rapidly increasing population growth.” She said reality does not wait and that she preferred to look five-year chunks ahead rather than 20 years because “Dubai is changing year by year.” She suggested that participants might break the future down into a series of five-year plans and focus on setting the pace for. Noting that in a global economy benchmarking what others are doing and setting the pace and path to economic growth is essential to drive success, she identified five key pillars of development: Hard infrastructure (roads, ports, etc.), soft infrastructure (regulation and policy), human capital, transparency and technology. She said that significant growth requires a government that provides political stability, inspires confidence and injects positive energy. She also called on all governments in the region to measure themselves against a competitive index of technological readiness, macro economic quality, and the international competitiveness of their public institutions.

Others taking part in the discussion included George T. Abed, former director of the Middle East department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He suggested that investing heavily in English-language education can help the Arab World achieve economic growth.

Abed also pointed out that India has achieved economic growth and huge successes in the outsourcing industry largely due to its investment in education, specifically English education.

He said that unemployment will continue to be a major problem affecting the Arab World. “With just four percent growth in the next few years, the inability of paltry economic growth to generate jobs and the competition faced from India and China, the number of unemployed in the Arab World will rise to 36 million,” he said.

He said that there were four key impediments to economic growth in the Arab World: Bloated governments, lack of modern institutions, underdeveloped financial institutions and absence of active capital markets.

He said that because the region’s population is set to grow at 3.7 percent the region would need an average economic growth rate of 6.5 percent. He warned that the region’s current and projected growth rates are only four per cent and called on the region to learn from both India and China that had achieved higher rates of growth. He also noted that the region’s performance is declining on a number of key global indicators including non-oil trade, and the use of new technologies such as the Internet.

He called on governments in the region to move from being managers and controllers of growth, to become “enablers of growth and guarantors of rights.” He also noted that reforms can not be driven from outside, “by preaching from the United States” that the Arab world must start to reform internally, beginning with the public sector reforms that would create “the moral authority to ask others to reform.”

According to Rudiger Grube, member of the board of management of DaimlerChrysler of Germany, the Arab world needs to provide equal opportunities to its citizens to become a political and economic power.

Grube mentioned six “pre-requisites” for development in the Arab world: “Political stability, widespread access to education, inclusion of women in political, economic and social life, reduction of bureaucracy, increase in transparency and a stop to externalization the Arab world’s problems.” The session reviewed a diverse range of issues including the major initiatives for economic reform, the fundamental changes required to attract local and foreign investment, redeployment of privatization revenues for development and the need to redefine the role of government.

Naguib sawris, chairman of Orascom Telecom of Egypt said planned economic integration of the Arab countries will benefit all countries of the region.

Although there are great differences among Arab countries, all of them could benefit from integration, he said. Competitive interests need not prevent effective integration of the Arab region, he said and cited Dubai as a model that the Arab World could emulate.