Calling for help

Friends of Tunisia - including China - could definitely help in two ways: the first is to assist Tunisians in building the foundations of sustainable economic growth. For this, Tunisia should aim at a synchronized development of three key sectors: agriculture (long neglected, even though the country is endowed with the most fertile land); industry (the country is severely lagging behind in this area, because of a lack of investment and lack of vision); and services (tourism, once flourishing, has been the first victim of the surge of terrorism that has followed the revolution).

Today, Tunisia is a social, economic, political, and cultural construction site. Everything has to be built or rebuilt. Tunisia needs to invest to develop and modernize agriculture, diversify production, boost exports, open factories and restore and build new infrastructure.

Those are projects that lead to job creation. But all this costs money. Even if Tunisia would take on debt from the World Bank for the next 30 years, it could not achieve this without the help of its friends. Besides, why turn to the World Bank and the IMF when there are countries that lend money to these two institutions? Why not instead turn directly to these countries and introduce them to projects that would earn them as much or more than their investments in other countries?

Tunisia could offer encouraging words to foreign investors, starting by alleviating the administrative burden and opening up its economy (still rated “not free” by the Index of Economic Freedom of the Heritage Foundation). In this year’s index, Tunisia is 11th out of 14 countries in the Middle East/north Africa region and 114th in the world. Its only consolation is that three major countries - Egypt, Algeria, and Iran - ranked behind it. But that’s little help when considering that Bahrain, with almost as much oil as Tunisia, ranked first in the region.