Word: saudi
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...prepared by the World Economic Forum and the World Bank. Since 2005, SAGIA has been pressing the notoriously sclerotic government bureaucracy to become more investor-friendly, simplify procedures and cut back on paperwork. Dahlia Khalifa, an economist on the World Bank team that produces the Doing Business report, credits Saudi Arabia with "consistent reforms over the past three years...
...World Economic Forum's list, it is 27th, up from 35th last year. It sprinted up the World Bank's list, from 67th in 2005 to 16th in 2008, making it the easiest place to do business in the Middle East. In that time, foreign investment in Saudi Arabia has nearly doubled, to $23 billion. "Foreign businesses are looking at us differently," al-Dabbagh boasts. Companies with a long history of working in the kingdom say they've noticed the difference. "The say/do factor has improved significantly," says Nabil Habayeb, GE's CEO for the Middle East and Africa. "When...
...Saudi Arabia is still some distance from being an investor's mecca. The kingdom ranks a woeful 137th on the World Bank's list when measured by ability to enforce contracts. For many investors, that will be a red flag. Saudi Arabia has also fared poorly on other lists that investors parse: it has slipped to 80th place on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2008, from 70th in 2005. By that reckoning, Saudi Arabia is one of the most corrupt places in the Middle East...
Businesses, homegrown and foreign alike, also face several problems that are unique to Saudi Arabia. The quality of the local workforce is poor, owing to an education system that has long placed religious studies above science and math (unlike that of the élites, who are often Western-educated). Reforms are under way, but it will be years before Saudi universities are churning out world-class engineers in the numbers the country needs. Nor can businesses expect to simply import employees, which has long been the norm in the Persian Gulf economies: mindful of that youth bulge, Riyadh is imposing...
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