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November 05, 2003
Arab REgion Business News: A subject I have to return to.
This evening I was sitting watching the evening business reports on al-Jazeerah and al-Arabiyah and a thought struck me: I am learning rather a lot about European and American business conditions, investing trends, etc. and literally nothing about the very region these fellows cover, supposedly.
In some ways this is not at all extraordinary: capital flight has meant vast sums of Arab money are in the Euro and American markets (although well placed sources characterize capital flows now as being to Europe, Asia and staying in the region. Arab flows to the US have all but dried up). Further to that, there is no transparency here. Even audited reports have to be kicked around a bit. Enron deceptions are, well, 'adi here. In addition I can't say that even the Arabsat journo standards are really all that amazing, but then business journalism, with rare exceptions such as FT is not the most ... critical field of journalism. A reader here, by the way, had a note on advert market that I would dearly like to quote from or use.
So, we have a combination of lack of press freedom; a tradition of punishing the messenger; little transparency, even from listed companies (I love being told to write a letter of justification in order to get an annual report as a potential investor. The concept of investor relations is utterly absent.); poor business journalism skills by any standard and a region only recently having begun to open up to liberalization of markets - journalists tend to come from backgrounds that put them ill at ease with economic liberalization.
That combination means that on Arab TV one is likely to learn less about the eocnomy than if one follows say, The Economist or at least EIU.
It's really sad, truly sad. Lack of information in the economic field really tends to bound potential entrepreneurs imaginations - or worse, leads them to try to model themselves after the half assed visions of Western economic developments rather than having a clear idea of how to tackle the actual economic landscape.
More to push underdevelopment.
If I thought I could overcome the barriers, I would fund a ARab Biz & Econ. media group. There are some good pubs by the way. For those readers who can follow Arabic, I highly recomend the monthly, al-Iqtisaad wal-'Aamaal (which they translit. with a K, lebs.) - the October issue by the way had a long interview with Bremmer. I meant to write up a comment on it, now I have reminded myself, I shall have to add it to the growing list of things I have to do.
Posted by The Lounsbury at November 5, 2003 08:07 PM
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Jan-Dec 2003
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