São Paulo – Expanding competitiveness of economies should be part of the reform agenda of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) after the Arab Spring. The conclusion is by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which promoted a meeting on economic growth and job generation in the Arab world, in the Dead Sea and Jordan.
The Arab Spring is a unique window of opportunity to deliver the wider economic prosperity that MENA citizens are expecting,” said Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Deputy Secretary-General Richard Boucher, at the release of a report about competitiveness in the Arab world.
According to the WEF, the popular uprisings that have already resulted in the fall of the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya place the lights on the social and economic challenges of the region. There is, according to the organisation, the need for generation of 2.8 million jobs for people of all ages. For such, it is necessary to create policies for three groups that are mainly affected by unemployment: youths, those with higher education and women.
The Forum shows, in a communiqué, that the region had good economic performance over most of the last decade, with average annual growth of 5.2% from 2000 to 2008, against 2.4% on average among the OECD countries, which include some of the largest economies in the world. However, the international financial crisis, in 2008, and the Arab Spring, this year, had a strong impact in most of the nations in the region, except for some oil-rich nations.
The extent of economic recovery, according to the WEF, should depend on the speed of the political transition processes in the region, on the economic reforms and on recovery of the global economy as a whole. “Particularly needed are measures to support a vibrant and competitive private sector,” says the communiqué.
During the meeting, the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, stated that the region “stands at the gate of the future” adding that there are four gates or crucial areas: dignity, opportunity, democracy and peace and justice.
The king emphasized that the region needs economic growth, as it has one of the world’s highest unemployment rates for youth. According to him, the region needs 85 million new work posts. For the growth to be possible, Abdullah II pointed out two essential factors: equal conditions and the empire of law.
WEF founder Klaus Schwab, added that job generation in the region requires a change in the paradigm of education to encourage more entrepreneurship and risk taking.
Making use of the event, the president of Coca-Cola, Muhtar Kent, announced that the company is going to invest US$ 5 billion in the Arab world over the next 10 years. He compared the Arab Spring to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, symbolising the end of the Cold War. “It is an inflection point for the whole region,” he said.
The prime minister of Qatar, Hamad Bin Jasr Al Thani, in turn, pointed out that the Arab Spring will be positive if leaders of the region do their homework. “The people will not accept things the way they were before January 2011,” he said, referring to the start of popular protests in North Africa.
Libya
In this respect, the prime minister of the National Transitional Council (NTC), Mahmoud Jibril, observed that the economic problems of the Arab world are not due to lack of money, but to the bad management of the funds available.
In Libya, which the NTC declared free last week, after the capture and death of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, last Thursday, one of the challenges, apart from reaching national union, is replacing the finite oil revenues for other sources of riches. To Jibril, there is a limited window of “opportunity to build an alternative economy”.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair, the United Nations Middle East Quartet Representative, said that if the Arab people do not feel a “tangible progress” over the coming three years, there should be a return to the popular protests. To the former secretary general of the League of Arab States, Amr Mussa, “elections are central and people must accept the outcomes.”
“We need to demonstrate quickly the fruits of the revolution in a country where weapons are widely available and young people are impatient,” said Tarik Yousef, the CEO of Silatech, from Qatar, regarding Libya.
*Translated by Mark Ament
