Asia - Middle East

On January 17th, Oman signed a long-term agreement with an United Arab Emirates based business group to set up the nation’s first iron and steel plant. The agreement marks a new era of industrial growth and the start of a metal cluster in Sohar, north west of Oman's capital Muscat. The UAE business group will set up one of the most modern iron and steel plants in a project totalling 750 million USD.

Kazakhstani president Nursultan Nazarbayev recently visited the Yutex textile mill, one of the companies set up to develop a textile cluster in southern Kazakhstan.

StartUp Jerusalem, an organisation that aims at creating an economic future for Jerusalem, launched a comprehensive plan for transforming the city into a major international center for industry in the health and life sciences.

As a founding member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Bahrain has been consistently ranked amongst the top most economically free countries in the world and has been rated as the freest economy in the Middle East and the Arab world.