For some Iraqi war refugees, business is booming

Better security and infrastructure have created new opportunities for some of the 250,000 war refugees still living in Jordan.

from the June 10, 2008 edition

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Some of that goes to small enterprises like Hassona's store, and coffee shops and art galleries that Iraqi refugees have opened in their new neighborhoods.

But much larger businesses have also landed in Amman because of the war, many of them started by Iraqis with long-standing business ties to Jordan.

Mazin Ayass has been living in Jordan since 1990. He moved his auto-parts business out of Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and spent the embargo years of the 1990s smuggling auto parts into Iraq by sea, evading United Nations inspectors.

He'd planned to return to Baghdad after the US invaded in 2003, when the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, declared the country "open for business." But the deteriorating security situation and lack of infrastructure there soon changed his mind, and he shifted his planning to Jordan.

In 2008, in an industrial area outside Amman, he laid the cornerstone for one of the region's first automobile manufacturing plants. So far he's brought in $31 million from foreign and local investors, he says. If all goes according to plan, Ayass Motors will have a partial assembly line running in a year and be ready to move to complete local manufacture by 2013.

But all this type of new investment isn't enough to completely shield Jordan from the global downturn. "Jordan has always had a boom-and-bust economy," notes Pete Moore, who teaches political science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and specializes in war economies. Nearly every regional crisis has caused an economic expansion in Jordan, he says, but for the most part, the benefits have only lasted as long as the crises themselves.

Local experts have complained that productivity and growth are not increasing on a par with the level of foreign investment. One of the country's leading economists, Yusuf Mansur, wrote in a recent column in The Jordan Times that the problem might be inflated investment figures or unproductive investments, or both.

To keep Jordan's boom going, economists say, the country needs growth industries that keep skilled workers in the country.

"It's precarious," says Scott Lasensky, a researcher for the United States Institute of Peace, "but it's no more precarious than Jordan has been" in the past. "As long as Baghdad remains unsafe, Amman is going to reap a whole series of benefits."

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