All Countries and All Sectors

Amidst this year's positive news on inflation, economic growth, exports and industrial output, certain Turkish officials could perhaps be forgiven a little for allowing themselves a little slack earlier this year when they wondered out loud if the country really needed a new IMF programme. Yet talk of the Fund's imminent departure from Turkish affairs - after several decades of involvement - now seems highly premature. As the Treasury geared up to meet this week's huge domestic debt redemption, it was time to remember that while the recovery may have been underway for some time now, there are still some significant burdens for the country to shoulder - and for which the IMF still seems badly needed.

The boom business of the Bulgarian economy in recent years, real estate has seen its strong upward path seem more uncertain in the last few months, despite unflagging interest from many foreign buyers. Meanwhile, real estate agents are becoming increasingly disgruntled with the slow pace of producing a new property register, while others wonder how land prices will fare as European Union membership approaches. In fact, the future of land ownership is becoming a much more heated issue in general, as the government looks to shore up its troubled agricultural sector.

Outlining the government's energy development strategy last month, Bulgaria's Energy and Energy Resources Minister presented a substantial list of future projects. With regional energy market liberalisation just around the corner, calls for a substantial refurbishment of power supply and generation facilities were high on the agenda, while some important new pipelines were also on the list. Yet the element of the plan that grabbed all the headlines was the project to build a new nuclear power plant, perhaps part-financed by funds aimed at helping decommission Bulgaria's existing reactors.

With the courts taking two steps back - and then one giant leap forward - in the privatisation of Turkey's giant state oil refiner this week, the country's troubled sell-off programme appeared to be stumbling forwards once again. Yet there is still a long way to go if the government is to meet its ambitious privatisation targets, while the inventory of assets still up for sale by the state grows steadily longer.

The following article on the Qatari LNG market is taken from the Oxford Business Group's latest publication, Emerging Qatar 2004. For more information on how to order a copy of the most comprehensive review of the Qatari economy to date, please write to us at mail@oxfordbusinessgroup.com, or click on the link to Printed Publications on the right-hand side of the page.

With Bulgaria's privatisation authorities announcing that they had struck more than 1,000 sell-off deals since the year began, it was a little disheartening for some to find that old chestnut, the Bulgarian Telecommunications Company (BTC), back in the privatisation headlines this week. A tangle over awarding it a GSM licence created some difficult legal conundrums for the company's new owners, while elsewhere in the mobile telecoms market new technologies are about to come on line.