The Arab world needs a massive investment programme to save it from the underlying crisis of dangerously high youth unemployment, which has reached 60 per cent in some areas, and the immediate challenge of rebuilding stability in the failing Arab states ravaged by civil war. A valuable suggestion on how to do this is the proposed Arab Stabilisation Plan, which was discussed at last week’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
The Plan is modelled on the Marshall Plan that provided American investment to rebuild Europe after the Second World War and it proposes to build an over-arching strategy for investment that would prioritise infrastructure projects on a national level and boost economic growth in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Tunisia.
The Arab world is not short of capital, so the investment would come mainly from within the Arab world from countries such as those in the Gulf and the private sector. This means that the plan can be organised within the region quite quickly by sympathetic governments and would not require running to the World Bank or other slow, multilateral institutions.
It is also important that such economic action should be put in place before final political stability is achieved. Commenting on the idea, former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad pointed out that his government had achieved a lot of good for individual Palestinians without waiting for a peace deal with Israel.
In fact, he commended the stabilising effect of investment in troubled areas as it encouraged people to settle and believe in an alternative to war and destruction.
