Nafta

President George Bush made a statement on March 5th stating, “Not all countries’ steel imports will be subject to the tariffs. Bush exempted steel from NAFTA trade partners Canada and Mexico, along with eighty developing nations. Egypt, being one of those eighty developing nations, meeting the criteria that the country’s share of total imports of the product, based on a recent representative period, does not exceed 3 percent, will allow according to Youssef Boutros Ghali, Egypt’s minister of foreign trade “an increase of Egyptian Steel exports to the United States from $70 million to $250 million till mid 2004” a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

This is highly beneficial for Egypt’s staggering economy which attracted (according to a March 9 report in Al Alam Al Youm), a noticeably large amount of interest in the final trading sessions of the bourse last week.

This exemption cam...