All Countries and All Sectors

As part of its strategy to achieve economic diversification, Qatar has made the promotion of the sports industry a major development goal. Indeed, the achievement of sports excellence forms an explicitly stated objective of the Qatar National Vision 2030 (QNV 2030). The country has played host to major international sporting events for over a...

Aided by easier and cheaper travel, global tourism has experienced two decades of almost uninterrupted growth. According to the World Bank, the number of international departures more than doubled between 1997 and 2017, from 687m to 1.57bn per annum.

The 2016 slump in oil prices led the Qatari government to identify industries with high growth potential in a diversified economy. Tourism was among the sectors prioritised due to the opportunities presented by infrastructure investment and major events such as the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

In September 2017 the Sri Lankan government launched an ambitious development plan, Vision 2025. The eight-year strategy aims to turn the country into an upper-middle-income one “by transforming Sri Lanka into the hub of the Indian Ocean, with a knowledge-based, highly competitive, social market economy”. While the government and the country...

With a key geostrategic location in the Indian Ocean, international trade is a natural focus for Sri Lanka. The country has signed on to a variety of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) over the years, with the most recent being the Sri Lanka-Singapore FTA (SLSFTA) in January 2018. Yet, as 2019 began, the SLSFTA ran into a...

Export industries received a welcome boost in May 2017, when the EU reinstated Sri Lanka’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) status, which had previously been rescinded over human rights concerns in 2010. GSP+ status removes the majority of import duties on Sri Lankan goods entering the European single market, providing access to...