Opportunity Cost of Conflict
A report by Strategic Foresight Group has calculated the opportunity cost of conflict for the Middle East from 1991-2010 at a whopping $12 trillion. Had there been peace in the region, Lebanon’s share during this period would be almost a $100 billion (according to 2006 prices). In other words, had there been peace and cooperation since 1991, every Lebanese citizen would be earning over $11,000 instead of the $5,600 in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Lebanon
Famous quotes containing the words opportunity, cost and/or conflict:
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the “dragon,” in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)