‘Innovate!’ has become the global mantra against a backdrop of intensified competitive environment. But focusing on product innovation alone is no guarantee of success; neither is bundling products with services in order to offer meaningful differentiation. Below, Michael Yaziji considers another approach – creating a radically unique business model to drive growth and market share.
By Josh Weinberg & Maya Rebermark, Communications, SIWI
Hydrologists like to call water the ‘bloodstream of the planet’. But it is much more than that. Water is essential to almost all human activities – including those we invest in financially.
Dubai Investments Park (DIP), the largest integrated business and residential community in the Middle East, was set up in 1997 with a mission to create a self-contained and master-planned business complex, and to provide investors with facilities and professional services that set new standards in the region.
By Tim Rogmans
Despite political turbulence, Middle Eastern markets provide great opportunities for international investors. The region’s advantages include its location at the crossroads of three continents, vast energy reserves and rapidly growing populations. Political risk is the main factor making multinational companies stay away from the region or limiting their involvement in licensing and franchising deals. This article outlines ways in which companies can enter and grow in the region, while managing political risk.
By Snowy Khoza
For decades the two global centres of power, the West (led by Europe and the Americas) and the East (led by China) have presented two contrasting approaches to economic development on the African continent. The West’s approach has been driven by conditionality, selectivity and direct financial support, while the East’s approach has been driven by non-conditionality, market building, and infrastructure delivery with tangible economic development. Below, Dr. Snowy Khoza describes how economic development dynamics in Africa have undergone a paradigm shift, with the influence of the East now more pronounced than ever before, and argues that Western and Eastern approaches to economic development in Africa must be used in combination to realise growth and transformation.
Africa’s rise over the past decade has been very real, and the evidence of the continent’s clear progress is irrefutable; however, there are significant challenges ahead. Below, Michael Lalor from Ernst & Young outlines the critical role of foreign investment in Africa, and the necessity of focussing on believers in the Africa growth story.
By Larry Allen
Looking back at previous waves of economic crisis, economic historian Larry Allen illuminates our global predicament by uncovering the interlocked economic processes that lay beneath the crisis.
The global crisis and the austerity programmes in most developed countries have cast light on the role of expatriated savings in widening the gap between domestic resources and financing requirements and also in eroding the tax revenues, thus reducing economic growth potential. Offshore tax havens have become the focus of academic research and a point of contention for governments, scholars and the media.
By Andrew Selee
Think tanks have sprung up throughout the world, trying to generate ideas and analysis that can be useful in public debate and in policymaking. Some think tanks have political or ideological aims; some want to raise attention to a particular issue; and others simply try to throw light on complicated issues in their field. Below, Andrew Selee considers how organisations invest in ideas about public policy, and outlines the steps they can take to enhance their possibilities of success.
By Flynt Leverett & Hillary Mann Leverett
Strategic competition between America and Iran will shape not only the Middle East’s balance of power, but also the dynamics of international order through much of the 21st century. Determination to compel Iran’s subordination is driving Washington and a coterie of European states to violate basic principles of rules-based regimes governing key dimensions of international security and commerce. This renders productive negotiation with Tehran virtually impossible, and makes U.S. foreign policy the world’s biggest source of political risk. It also prompts backlash from rising non-Western powers that could undermine the functioning of rules-based regimes for nuclear nonproliferation, trade, and other vital issues.
