War in Iraq could cost Arab countries a trillion dollars

BEIRUT (AFP) Apr 15, 2003
The US-led war on Iraq could cost as much as 1,000 billion dollars in lost production in Arab countries, a UN economic seminar was told on Monday.

At the start of a four-day session of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) on the regions economic progress, the Commissions Executive Secretary Mervat Tallawi said: "A dark cloud is covering the whole world, and the Arab region in particular."

She estimated the cost of the war at a trillion dollars in lost Gross Domestic Product, on top of the 600 billion dollars lost due to the last Gulf war 12 years ago.

Tallawi added that between four and five million jobs had been lost following the previous Gulf war and that was expected to rise to between six and seven million as a result of the current conflict.

She said: "In the past ten years, average per capita income in the Arab region has been the lowest in the world, largely because of the fall in the price of oil."

Over the years, war and civil strife have conspired to divert the resources and energies of many ESCWA members from their development objectives, she added.

Tallawi catalogued the region's woes as: "a fall in interest rates, an increase in military spending, which reached double the international average, a fall in tourist and transport income, particularly among airlines, a rise in the cost of insurance and reinsurance as well as a decrease in trade between Arab countries.

She also cited "the degradation of the environment following military attacks and the use of arms of mass detruction, cluster bombs ... as well as human, civil and military losses, the rise in the number of handicapped ... the rise in the unemployment rate, the rise in population density, the outbreak of extremism and fanaticism, emigration and the consequent loss of human resources".

ESCWA would concentrate its efforts on a "limited number of priorities" -- "water, globalisation, social policy and technology", along with activities linked to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Iraq after the war, she said.

The ESCWA member states are: Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

SPACE.WIRE