Just last month a senior representative of the major French firm Bouyges visited Belgrade to discuss future investment in Yugoslavia. Bouyges is interested in major infrastructural and construction projects in the country, including highways, water processing plants and even an underground rail system for Belgrade.
However once again, western economic sanctions seem set to starve Yugoslavia of the foreign investment it needs in order to begin economic recovery. The Kosovo crisis has led to a ban on new foreign investment in Yugoslavia as well as major restrictions on international financial transactions. Yugoslavia will have to wait longer before benefitting from the attentions of major foreign companies such as Bouyges.
Since 1991 economic sanctions arising from military adventures sponsored by President Slobodan Milosevic have stifled the Yugoslav economy. According to the Belgrade Times the Kosovo crisis is now likely to ensure that the government will not reach its target of attracting more than £1 billion in foreign capital in 1998.
Mr Goran Pitic, assistant professor at Belgrade's School of Economics, says many foreign investors have identified industries in which they would like to invest and potential business partners in Yugoslavia. Without political stability, however, there will be no investment.
Breweries, cement factories, oil and sugar processors are all regarded as attractive to foreign investors. In the former communist states such concerns, no matter how inefficient, are attractive to foreign investors. They can be bought cheaply and developed rapidly, taking advantage of comparatively low wage rates.
It is common for President Milosevic to blame economic sanctions for the mess of the country's economy. Inflation is running at more than 100 per cent per annum - a statistic not helped by the president's occasional solution to money shortages: simply printing more currency notes.
Official unemployment stands at more than 1 million people and rose by 2.2 per cent in the last year. There is also a further figure of more than 1 million who are unofficially unemployed. These include people on compulsory extended vacations from factories which are temporarily closed due to sanctions.
Domestic business confidence is low. Some 17.9 per cent of Yugoslav business people expect the position of their companies to deteriorate over the next three months, according to a recent survey. A total of 45,146 companies that employ more than 1.25 million have been found to be permanently or consistently insolvent in the first four months of 1998.
The state also faces the problem of how to compensate those who had savings in hard currency deposited in Yugoslav banks, only to find they could not get their money when Yugoslavia broke up. About £3 billion is owed to Yugoslavs, much of it consisting of savings by individuals working abroad in Germany or elsewhere. For the regime economic sanctions provide an excuse for the economic difficulties, many of which are due to the lack of economic reform since the end of communism. However the sanctions ensure that the new injection of life that substantial foreign investment would bring is again postponed.