Mediterranean Programme - [05/28/2008]

The Mediterranean, a strategic opportunity for Catalonia's economic interests

The presentation and discussion of a study carried out by Javier Albarracín brought together a significant number of representatives of Catalonia's public administrations and economic actors in the CIDOB Foundation. This study - which will be published in the near future in the Mediterranean series of the CIDOB Foundation's work documents - deals with the countries and sectors that are strategic to Catalonia's economic interests, as well as identifying the main actors in the game and proposing paths for future action.

Javier Albarracín, an adviser to the Mediterranean and Middle East Area of COPCA (Consortium for Commercial Promotion of Catalonia) and a collaborator on the CIDOB Foundation's Mediterranean Programme, stressed that in spite of their image problems, the countries of the Mediterranean basin represent very dynamic economies, which are growing strongly. Albarracín pointed out that thanks to the reforms carried out by the governments in Turkey, Egypt and Morocco, and owing to questions of proximity and these countries’ demographic growth, this area possesses a fundamental strategic importance for Catalonia. Both the author and the other participants in the session claimed that sectors such as medicine, telecommunications, the environment and, particularly, logistics, are offering enormous business opportunities which some actors - including small and medium-sized companies - are already taking advantage of.

The study presented at the Foundation included a number of recommendations on how best to defend Catalonia's economic interests in the area. These recommendations included: sending top-level political and economic missions to the big cities in the region, promoting the presence of Catalan experts in the main organisations in the area, improving air connections from Barcelona (thereby exploiting the attraction potential of the "Barcelona model"), turning Barcelona into an important training centre and hosting a major Mediterranean economic forum in the city, an event that would have the added value of inviting all actors, without political exclusion - that is to say, including the Islamist sectors. All these ideas should be carried out with the aim of making Barcelona into not just the "capital of the Mediterranean, but the capital for the Mediterranean”.

In this session, which saw the participation of representatives from organisations such as the Port of Barcelona, IEMed, PIMEC, UGT, ICEX, the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Generalitat and the Patronat Catalunya-Món, there was a wide consensus on points such as the need to improve Catalonia's infrastructures, to promote the Port of Barcelona more, to improve coordination between all the Catalan institutions, to become involved as much as possible in Euro-Mediterranean cooperation and to request an improvement of its financial instruments in this framework. In other words, the event’s participants adapted and updated economist Ramon Tremosa’s line “Catalonia must be logistics, or it will not be" into "Catalonia must be Euro-Mediterranean, or it will not be”.

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