rhys wrote:I’d like to hear you’re opinion, not on your political affinity, but how you think we can start thinking like an emerging market.
I worked in Beirut for three years during the 90s. Lebanon is a small country, created out of a greater Syria at the end of WW1 by a Christian majority amongst Moslems and Druze. Beirut became a financial hub during the 50s, gaining the moniker "Switzerland of the Middle East".
Demographic changes led to the Moslem population outbreeding the Christians, and this was augmented by a Palestinian refugee influx. Homogeneity of religion has decreased, and in the Middle East, secularity does not exist. YOu are what your father was. An increasingly disgruntled section of the population that had not prospered from trade and finance, as well as a disenfranchised Palestinian element, led to a civil war in 1976, that was eventually settled by Saudi influence in 1990. The result has been catastrophic for the economy. During the 70s, 1LBP purchased 1GBP. Today 1GBP purchases approximately LBP120000. That financial hub moved to Dubai.
A Lebanon without any mineral resources to exploit now struggles to feed a much larger population. Its run by an oligarchy, there's an evident super rich class, cash stashed abroad and an underclass that struggles to survive. The middle class has been eviscerated. It emigrated or withered.
I'm finally coming to the point. This was a leading country that has fallen back to EM status. But it survives because its people have never had a state safety net to provide for them. Kids value education. Young graduates continue to study in their spare time for second and third degrees. Street crime hardly exists since its shameful (although Syrian refugees have led to an increase), and in anycase, the youths are at home doing as much homework as they can find. There's a highly developed sense of self preservation and everyone's a grafter or a trader. Not to do so would mean being left behind. I don't see that the indigenous British population has the initiative to survive in an environment where life is tough, since we've had it easy. The immigrants, by comparison, know how to get on. The entitled days of Empire are long gone, it's perhaps time to compete on an equal footing with the world's footloose.
I think you are exactly on the money. Your final paragraph describes Hong Kong for most of my 23 years there. The population was made up mostly of refugees from ‘over the border’ and as I think I have already said somewhere, the average Chinese attitude in these days, from a coolie probably working for 12 hours a day, when he saw a ‘fat cat’ being driven in a Rolls Royce was ‘One day that will be me’. No envy just ambition. No welfare, although eventually there was basic (very basic) public housing. Work or starve. The guys in my office were not that well paid but they were not poor and in fact mostly seemed to have plenty of spare cash. Taxes were very low both for individuals and companies which left plenty of room for charity in the best sense.
In the UK today there is far too much welfare so that people do not have to work if they do not want as the State will provide. Any government here nowadays would be regarded as socialist by the standards of pre Second World War I would think, although even my memory does not go back that far!
We need a reforming government which of course we will not get because it would be committing political suicide.
Dod
That must have been late 80's.