Opportunity Cost of Conflict
A report by Strategic Foresight Group, a think tank in Asia has calculated the opportunity cost of conflict for the Middle East from 1991-2010 at US$12 trillion (12,000,000,000,000). Syria’s share in this is over a $150 billion. The government also spends almost 7% of its GDP on the military, compared to 2% spent on health care.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Syria
Famous quotes containing the words opportunity, cost and/or conflict:
“... the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“How much would it cost you to stand at the wrong end of a shooting gallery?”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, Huxley College president to con artist Baravelli (Chico Marx)
“Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress. One might call the first the Asiatic, the second the European principle.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)