European investment in Arab countries is $3.1 billion a year

European investment in the Arab countries is $3.1 billion which is mainly concentrated in 5 countries; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Oman.

The UN report on international investment showed that these countries received 86% of the region's total investment. Egypt alone received more than $1 billion, which represents about 32 % of the total investment in the Arab region.

On the other hand, the UN report also mentioned that the volume of external Arab investment was about $1.2 billion. The years between 1990 and 1995 witnessed great fluctuations mainly caused by the Gulf war. But this amount rose to $1.75 billion during the past two years.

It also mentioned that in spite of the great amount of international investment during the past 5 years and the role it played in transferring technology, one third of this amount (about $2.3 billion) was in the industrial countries. The rest of the investment was in a small number of the developing countries in southeast Asia. The share of more than 100 developing countries did not exceed 1% of the total international investment.

The biggest part of the international investment was used for merging operations as it used $229 billion out of $315 billion.