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| INVEST IN THE
MEDITERRANEAN -
SELLING POINTS |
| North-South synergies |
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| How to reinforce North-South cooperation and move the European Union closer to its neighbours situated on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean ? |
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| Photo : North-South synergies |
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North-South synergies
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Obvious complementarities |
The North and the South of the Mediterranean are complementing each other in many ways, starting with nature and its possible impact on culture: sun vs. rain, farniente vs. stress, "youthism" vs. respect of old people, hospitality and care spirit vs. individualism etc. In the economic field, the main synergies to be expected are:
- The announced need for labor force in Europe, very significant after 2010, when MEDA will be keeping an sustainable excess of potential workers;
- The respective vocations to deliver certain types of goods or services, despite inevitable competition: for instance, MEDA agriculture could complement cereals and meat produced in Europe with fruits, vegetables or fish;
- The European saving excess (order of magnitude of Euro 30 bn per year), which could be invested in MEDA, where capital needs are huge.
Some are starting reflecting on common strategies: e. g. joint tourism offer, with a stay on the Northern rim combined with a stay in the South (one of the concepts of the Mediterranean Tourism Forum organised by ASCAME in 2004). |
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Begin by integrating the South? |
« The South must in time become a single market. It's a fundamental challenge. The process has to gain speed, it is our priority » hammered out François Loos, the French Minister responsible for External Trade, in March 2003, during a trip to Marseille.
This point of view finds reciprocal sentiments on the other side of the Mediterranean. Thus, for Ahmed Abdelkhefi, President of Tuninvest Finance Group, which manages 80 million Euros of investments in various sectors of the Tunisian economy, « only cooperation between the countries of the Maghreb may offer sufficient visibility and a critical market size for European investors. They must be feelings of a real union between us and for our part, we have to liberalise our frontiers. I note, while I am on this subject, that we have taken a new approach vis à vis our neighbour Algeria. Just think about this, outside gas and oil, Algiers derives 75% of its GDP from the private sector. It is a good indicator for the future » .
All the players in the Euro-Mediterranean partnership are aware of it: the success of South-South integration constitutes a key component of success for the whole of the region, especially because it would be likely to create scale economies which would compensate the small size of the local markets (taken separately) and which would in this way favour the entry of investments to the Southern shore of the Mediterranean. And any number of initiatives have been taken in this sense more especially for specific projects (fishing, tourism). But the most important is without any doubt the encouragement given to the birth of real partnerships inside the zone in all sectors of activity.
The political determination to promote intra-regional accords has been registered within the Barcelona agreements signed from 1995. Not less than seven meetings between the Foreign Ministers of the Fifteen EU countries and their counterparts in the twelve MEDA states have been devoted to this subject. The European Commission is today openly encouraging any initiative - such as the Agadir process- which is moving in the direction of a real cooperation between the MEDA countries. |
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Towards North-South redistribution of industrial activities and services |
Another key stake in North-South cooperation is how to manage more effectively a redistribution of the industrial activities on the two shores: relocations certainly to the benefit of the South for the sectors which cannot bear the salary costs of the North and also true sustainable co-development, in certain domains where the South may be leader.
A Franco-Italian company, like ST Microelectronics, for example, currently designs chips in the Maghreb and, paradoxically, subsequently produces them in Europe. This may be understood for an activity in which the R&D element represents a considerable amount of work - and where the human potential of the young engineers is an asset - while the production itself - on the basis of heavy capital investments is largely automated in Europe. |
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