There is a flurry of activity going on after the first “Invest in Yemen” extravaganza. Some of the things sound quite good and I’m impressed by what has been proposed. One of the best things is the elimination of an entire division of the government. I don’t remember the exact names of the departments, but there are currently two different departments that foreign investors have to go through to get the required permissions. The president has make it clear that he wants what he calls a “Single window” approach. I think that that is his goal, to be able to go to one department (and perhaps one person) and take care of everything that relates to opening a business here. To start, he has ordered (not really sure how this works and who has jurisdiction over what) the elimination of one of the departments so that there is only one that is responsible for these sorts of things. That is going to be huge, making things simpler is much more attractive. It also removes a potential layer of corruption. In an ideal world, those positions in the old department would just be done away with and the government shrunk a little. My cynical view is that those people will probably just be reassigned to other parts of the government.
They are also going to lower tax rates (although they want to impose a sales tax), have generous land privileges (they will just give you the land if the capital investment is over $10 million), and try to get the weapons thing under control (see earlier post). One of the more refreshing things has been the admission of the amount of corruption and the toll it has taken on the economy and the investment world. Admitting there is a problem is a first step… only 11 more steps to go, LOL. A recent article in the paper talks about how the military police will start to crack down on traffic incidents involving military vehicles. It has become a bit of a problem, more than a few military people flout the laws, cause accidents, or otherwise just bully traffic. The police have also admitted that a lot of the vehicles that have the blue police license plates aren’t police vehicles at all, they only have them so that they can get through customs check points. Once again, they didn’t give any details on how they hope to combat this problem, but it is refreshing to hear them admit some of their problems. Here’s hoping that it is the start of a real reform that will move this place forward. Yemen, I’m giving you a break for a while, but don’t regress!:-)