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To: The Flying Crane who wrote (4209)	10/30/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: TsioKawe	Respond to of 40688

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) - Egyptian Economy Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali said Sunday exporters could exploit the passing weakness of Asian rivals to put Egypt on the global trade map. He told a seminar that Egypt, whose pound effectively shadows the dollar, could carve out benefits in coming months as a weakening U.S. currency made its exports more competitive. Declining U.S. interest rates and a widening U.S. current account deficit would erode the dollar, and therefore the pound, especially against European currencies, Boutros-Ghali said. ''Our currency has moved with the dollar ... which means we are going to depreciate vis-a-vis the European currencies, which means a boost to the price competitiveness of our products. ''This boost will not be enough for us to penetrate markets unless we do other things as well, meaning structural changes that affect product quality, product delivery, quality of management and so on,'' Boutros-Ghali said. ''We have a window of opportunity through which we can penetrate world markets and the most important of them for us is the European Union,'' he declared. Egypt, which launched IMF-backed reforms in 1991, wants to increase its non-oil exports, valued at $3.52 billion in fiscal 1997-98 (July-June) and projected at $3.837 billion this year. The minister said the economies of Egypt's main trading partners in the United States and Europe were still growing, despite an IMF forecast that the U.S. economy would expand 2 percent in 1999, compared to 3.5 percent in 1998. At the same time, prospects of southeast Asian exporters flooding markets with goods made cheap by currency devaluations had been dented by credit crunches in their countries, he argued. ''This won't last forever and some have already started to recover,'' Boutros-Ghali said. ''But while it does we should position ourselves for a larger market share in most of the markets where these countries are.'' Even if some buyers switched back to their original suppliers, those that remained ''should be able to give the necessary boost to our export process and our export promotion policy that will put us on the export map of the world,'' he said.