Lebanese businesspeople want the industry ministry to move its headquarters from the Adlieh neighborhood to Beirut Port to help boost exports, which rose 12 percent in the first half of this year compared to the corresponding period of last year, reported the Daily Star on Thursday.
“We are proposing a project to move the ministry to the export center (at the port),” Fadi Abboud, head of the North Metn Industrialists Association said.
“It would be the first merger between the public and private industrial bodies,” he added.
The export center at the port, completed last year, will soon feature a permanent exhibition of Lebanese goods to spur exports.
Last year, Lebanese exports exceeded $700 million for the first time since 1996, said the paper.
In the first six months of this year, Lebanon exported $387 million worth of goods.
Industry Minister George Frem said the increasing importation of industrial equipment, which accounts for 30 to 40 percent of industrial investment, would result in a rise in exports of manufactured goods.
The minister said industrialists were investing between $200 million and $300 million and claimed that “for every $15,000 invested by industrialists, one job is created in the industrial sector and two more emerge in other sectors.”
Earlier this year, Frem launched a 12-point program to increase exports by 15 percent annually and raise the industrial sector’s contribution to gross domestic product from 17 percent to 20 percent, the paper added.
So far, only a few parts of the program have been implemented: tariff cuts on raw and semi-finished imports, a lowering of employers’ social security payments, and a decrease in export fees at Beirut Port – Albawaba.com
