Israel Active

Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal is to invest tens of millions of shekels to open at least ten SPAR stores in Israel, as well as sell SPAR products in Shufersal stores. The lower prices of SPAR products are expected to help reduce Israel’s cost of living. See previously.

This negatively headlined article on Israel in 2022 is mostly comprised of good news. Productivity increasing; hi-tech booming; unemployment decreasing; job vacancies increasing; education results improving; life expectancy rising. Can’t these journalists lighten up a bit?

Dubai-based NOW Money is to use the AI anti-money laundering (AML) platform from Israel’s ThetaRay to help prevent financial crimes on its payments systems. ThetaRay’s SONAR cloud-based AML solution will monitor cross-border payments processed by NOW Money.

Over 2.6 million foreign tourists visited Israel in 2022, compared to 397,000 in 2021 and 831,000 in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Israel opened its borders to tourists in Mar 2022 and all restrictions were dropped in May. Israelis enjoyed a record 20 million overnight local hotel stays in 2022.

Israel’s rate of unemployment fell in November to 4.1% from 4.3% in October. The fall was mainly due to the rise in workforce participation to 60.6% (60.3% Oct).

Excellent short article by Prof. Micheal Humphries of the Jerusalem College of Technology and Touro College Israel. He gives six key reasons why (except for 2020 - Covid), Israel has had positive economic growth every year since 2003, including during the 2008-9 Great Recession.

The UK Economist magazine ranked Israel the fourth best performing economy of the top 34 countries in the OECD. It was based on five macroeconomic indicators - GDP growth, annual inflation, inflation breadth, share prices, and government debt.

Israel’s AIR has conducted the first forward horizontal test flight of its AIR ONE prototype electric flying vehicle (see previously). It follows July’s successful hover test. The latest test carried 150kg simulating the weight of passengers in addition to the plane’s 1,100kg unladen weight.

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Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been recently seen several times in Israel. He has interests in over two dozen Israeli startups including Twiggle, Infinity Augmented Reality, Lumus and ThetaRay.