Trends » Clare Dunkley http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress Business Magzine Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:11:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en An Unbalanced Scorecard http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2008/12/30/an-unbalanced-scorecard/ http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2008/12/30/an-unbalanced-scorecard/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:29:55 +0000 Clare Dunkley http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/?p=448 It never rains but it pours,” might, sadly, be the best way to describe Yemen’s pent-up tourism potential. The devastating floods that struck the Hadramout province in late October not only killed dozens of residents and destroyed homes, but damaged the world-famous medieval mud-brick “high-rises” of Shibam – a UNESCO World Heritage site known as the “Manhattan of the desert” and a major draw for travelers who are intrepid enough to venture there.
The previous month, an attack by the shadowy al-Qaeda in Yemen (AQY) group on the US embassy in Sana’a killed 16 people and hit international headlines – discouraging tourism and wider foreign involvement in the country’s struggling economy. The government had only just pacified the latest outbreak of the sporadic Houthi rebellion in the northern Saada region.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was re-elected in 2006 (having served as head of state since the union of north and south of the country in 1990), could be forgiven for thinking that attempts to promote swifter development were being deliberately thwarted by events beyond his control.
Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index, published this year in late September, puts Yemen 141st out of 180 countries, with Saudi Arabia in 80th spot and its five GCC fellows considerably higher up the rankings. Close to 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, despite its oil revenues. Yet this blessing is also a curse. Being almost completely dependant on oil exports means Yemen will see falling revenues as output declines precipitously. Between 2006 and 2007, for instance, it dropped by 11.6 percent to 336,000 barrels/day (b/d).
An international donors conference convened in London in mid-November 2006, but it proved the GCC was more supportive financially than in terms of genuine political and economic integration. Out of a total of $4.7 billion pledged in support of Sana’a’s 2006-2010 Third Five-year Development Plan for Poverty Reduction and concurrent Public Investment Program (PIP), more than half the funds were promised by the Gulf states (they also played a central role in planning the gathering). The money should go most of the way towards plugging an estimated $5.5 billion gap between the government’s means and the $12.6 billion costing of the PIP, which aims to roughly double annual GDP growth by 2010 to 7 percent from about 3.6 percent in 2007.

]]> http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2008/12/30/an-unbalanced-scorecard/feed/ Business as Unusual http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2008/12/11/business-as-unusual/ http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/2008/12/11/business-as-unusual/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:45:07 +0000 Clare Dunkley http://www.trendsmagazine.net/out_wordpress/wordpress/?p=373 The Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) might be feeling a little hard done by compared to how other GCC states are dealing with the fallout from the global financial markets. It’s renowned, not always approvingly, as the region’s most cautious and conservative regulator. Yet since summer, its governor Sheikh Salem Abdel-Aziz al-Sabah has been forced to reverse its 18-month anti-inflation drive, which began after the country abandoned the US dollar exchange rate peg in May 2007. The problems emerging at Gulf Bank in late October led al-Sabah to confront the Gulf’s first potential run on a bank with an institution-specific government bailout.

Gulf Bank’s revelation in late October that it had lost some 200 million Kuwaiti dinars ($739 million) through foreign exchange derivatives trading on the account of a single customer (although local bankers say other parties were involved) galvanized the CBK to decisive action before contagion spread. The financial sector was already jittery, and bearish investor sentiment had been pushing the Kuwait Stock Market (KSE) to record lows in the preceding weeks.

The regulator issued a statement claiming that the losses would not “affect Gulf Bank’s activities [nor] its ability to continue providing its normal banking services.” Police vans still had to be deployed outside Gulf Bank’s head office in the capital, Kuwait City, as savers rushed to withdraw deposits. CBK had to guarantee all customer deposits held with local banks, and the legislation to do so was passed with unprecedented swiftness by the National Assembly (parliament) on Oct. 29. “The cabinet reassures the safety of the banking system in Kuwait… and will take all the measures needed to strengthen the trust in our banking apparatus and its ability to compete with international banks,” the government explained in a statement to the official Kuwait News Agency (Kuna).

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