U.S. Government to Encourage Private Investments in Israel

The opening of a field counseling center in Israel has brought the Mutual Security Agency’s contact clearing house service into action for the first time in the Near East, the MSA announced here today.

Inauguration of the contact clearing house service in Israel will provide a two-way exchange of investment opportunities between business firms in the United States and Israel.

Israel has now joined 13 Western European countries and the Philippines in utilizing this service, designed to help encourage and stimulate a greater flow of American private capital and industrial skills abroad.

The contact clearing house service, conducted by MSA’s Office of Small Business, helps individual private enterprises–regardless of size–here and abroad to find potential investment partners interested in entering into investment agreements involving capital, industrial patents, processes, techniques, equipment, and services. Once suitable contacts are arranged, the service ends. It is then up to the individual firms to conduct their own negotiations, which may lead to the successful conclusion of an investment agreement of mutual benefit.

Approximately 6,000 industry associations, chambers of commerce, banks and other organizations in the United States, Western Europe, the Philippines and Israel are cooperating as field counselors under the new service. These volunteer counselors collect and disseminate specific investment proposals of private enterprises and arrange contacts between American and overseas firms interested in entering into investment arrangements.

Since inception of the service in Western Europe in 1950, American and European counselors have gathered and disseminated approximately 2,000 specific investment opportunities. It is hoped that extension of the program to Israel will help with that country’s plans for speeding up industrial development.