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Source: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2072891
Peace through Industrial Parks
(Economist-UK) - On September 17th, Stef Wertheimer, a 77-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, arrived in Washington, D.C., seeking money and support to build industrial parks in the Arab world. In Israel, Wertheimer has built four industrial parks with 162 companies, mostly start-ups, using Arab and Jewish workers. Collectively, they produce $600m annually in products, largely for export. He is part-owner of two more parks under construction - near Istanbul, Turkey, and Aqaba, Jordan. It is hard to find any Arab country with an economic model capable of sustaining long-term growth. Those countries that are rich have oil and little else, and oil will not last forever. True, Dubai is turning itself into a tourism and banking hub, and one or two other Gulf states have other niche ambitions, but they are too small to transform the region. The only nation in the Middle East that has a sophisticated, dynamic economy is Israel. Despite decades of war and terrorism, and lacking natural resources, it has managed to develop world-class companies and a strong middle class. Yet its economic model has not been imitated elsewhere in the Middle East.