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Essay on Economic Impact: Rebuilding of Iraq
Rebuilding Iraq is the first business conference to include a cultural agenda in its program. Most Iraqis and Middle Easterners agree that cross-cultural awareness is a business imperative for growth potential. To assure that the cultural community has a strong voice in the reconstruction planning process, major foundations and institutions have been invited to recommend strategies for long-term collaboration with the Iraqi people (Bakhtin, 2003).
These strategies include socially responsible investment (SRI) funds, cultural heritage preservation, environmental protection, diversity management, education, public diplomacy, and multi-cultural industrial design, marketing, health-care, and safety practices (Bakhtin, 2003). Organizers of the cultural agenda have formed several public-private partnerships that will serve as models for the reconstruction community.
The Bush Administration should help Iraqi opposition leaders to develop an economic reform package for their country. A double strategy of ensuring security and enabling economic growth will need international support.
For the Iraqi people, structural economic reform and comprehensive privatization of government assets is necessary to stimulate recovery and provide stability. The winning strategy of structural reform and privatization would also benefit the industrial world, the United States and its allies, countries of the Middle East, and the developing world.
Iraq’s return to global markets would allow for a more abundant and stable energy supply, a higher cash flow for the Iraqi people, and numerous business opportunities for the region and the world (Bakhtin, 2003). Iraq’s restructuring and privatization of its oil and gas sector could become a model for oil industry privatizations in other OPEC states as well, weakening the cartel’s influence over global energy markets.
A confusing mix of market psychology, heated political rhetoric and calculations of the costs of war vs. continued containment of Saddam Hussein caused headaches for economists trying to quantify the risks the nation's economy faced during the uncertain days before the Iraq invasion......
