Business students at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada had a chance to hear which country they should invest their income-to-be. The promising locations were Latvia, El Salvador and Lebanon:
Margers Krams of Latvia, Rafael Alfaro of El Salvador and Massoud Maalouf of Lebanon were in Windsor as part of the sixth annual Ambassador Tour arranged by the Christian Embassy, a non-profit interdenominational agency.
…the three ambassadors pitched their respective countries to students as if they were courting multimillion-dollar investors.
Let me guess, the Lebanese ambassador focused on Lebanon’s strategic location and its booming tourism?
“Lebanon is the gateway to the Middle East,” boasted Maalouf, pointing out his native country’s strategic location, high number of universities and even tourism potential.
How original! Now its only fair to inform these young investors that Lebanon also is politically unstable, bombs and grenades go off practically every other day with no one the wiser, corruption and bribery are the only ways to get things done, and let’s not forget a crumbling infrastructure.
If you really want to flush money down the toilet, I recommend the Lebanon Cedar Island project.
Exasperation beyond relief @ cedar island… I can’t argue again… It’s all I’ve been doing for the past three days, I swear…
About the rest of your post, all what you say holds true… However bear in mind that until the recent security events (and war) Lebanon was the country receiving the highest level of FDI in the Arab world and with high rates of return…
I believe that people should not refrain from investing in Lebanon all together, but when they invest, they should bear in mind all the things you mentioned…
Have a little faith in your country man and remember that on the economic level optimism does have its values! 🙂
My comments are simply out of frustration that since 1990, we haven’t had a stable power supply. We’ve reached a point that we accept that we don’t have 24 hour electricity! This is not something we should accept. I was reading a few months back on how the rolling black outs were devastating the South African economy. To us, that’s just another day; we barely think twice about it.
Investment for Lebanon are extremely important, however the government needs and can do much more to ensure that more development money comes in.