BEIRUT, 25 June 2004 — Lamenting the divisions in the Arab world, Lebanon’s prime minister yesterday urged Arab nations to follow Europe’s lead and band together in a common market to face future challenges, such as unemployment.
In an opening speech to the 10th Arab Investment and Capital Markets conference in Beirut, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said the idea of an Arab common market is as old as the idea of the European Common Market.
“The Arab common market was not achieved. The European common market became a union,” Hariri told hundreds of Arab business and bank executives, Cabinet ministers and officials, including Dubai’s crown prince and former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
He pointed to Arab countries signing agreements with the European Union and the World Trade Organization “but we don’t sign agreements with each other.” Hariri, a billionaire construction tycoon, proposed a 20-year program “to make our target to have something similar to what is happening in Europe by 2025.”
The prime minister said Arab economies will have to create 100 million new jobs by that date. “Unemployment is the primary problem that faces the nation... No Arab country can say it is excluded.”
Hariri cited the economic miracles in Dubai, the Gulf emirate that emerged as the region’s business hub in recent years, and in Malaysia as examples of what the Arabs could do. “It is not impossible to transfer our countries from the situation that we are in now to a better state,” Hariri said.
Some Arab countries have signed some bilateral and close cooperation agreements but attempts at a common Arab market have been unsuccessful owing to political differences and regional disparities between the oil-rich Gulf and other Arab countries in Africa and the Levant.
Dubai’s crown prince, Sheik Muhammad Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, in a question and answer session, said the Arab world is a huge market but the volume of trade among Arab countries amounted to between 6 and 8 percent. “I’ve heard for a long time about the Arab (common) market... Every one talks but nothing is done,” Sheik Mohammed said. He said forging a common market will take time. “We have a big market and strong capabilities. This cannot be achieved unless governments agree to it and begin the work,” he said.
Meanwhile, the four-nation European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and Lebanon signed a free trade agreement yesterday, EFTA said. The agreement covers industrial goods, fish, finished agricultural products, investment, some services and intellectual property, EFTA said in a statement after a ministerial meeting between members Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland in the western Swiss town of Montreux.
Under the terms of the agreement, EFTA will start to lift trade barriers from 2005, while Lebanon is due to gradually eliminate trade barriers between 2008 and 2015. It is the sixth agreement the EFTA states have concluded with a non-EU state in the Mediterranean basin.
