A: Total population is 2.1 million with an unemployment rate of 34%. The high unemployment stems from many people operating in a gray economy, claiming healthcare and social security benefits, yet in reality they are employed and work with cash payments.

The actual unemployment rate is somewhere between 15% and 18%, which is still significantly high. Most of this stems from the loss of employment from state industries that have been privatized.

Certainly the number of people that were needed has decreased due to the privatization process. Yet this has created a lot of skilled people - many engineers are driving taxi''s for a living. It''s not unusual for a perfectly educated person speaking English to be a taxi driver.

In the former Yugoslavia, English and German were taught at a young age and many people have a working knowledge of these two languages, unlike most countries in Eastern Europe. In Macedonia, English is taught in all elementary schools. Macedonia spends 6% of its GDP on education, even higher than the OECD average. The high school graduation rate has increased in the last three years and has reached 65%.

Now we are seeing a trend, especially with the influx of new private universities, more and more people are looking to complete four year degree programs.

Q: What segments of the Macedonian economies are attractive to foreign investors?

A: The service sector is the larger contributor to the economy in general, but the largest industrial sectors are metallurgy, agriculture and textiles. Industries outside the largest sectors of the economy are the most important and most competitive where we feel we can attract investments.

In particular, the most interest that we have seen over the last six months despite the current crisis is in the manufacturing of automotive components. Auto component and final automotive assembly has moved to Central and Eastern Europe, and our proximity to major markets in Europe and Turkey makes Macedonia very attractive. We can serve the markets in the region with annual sales of between five and six million cars.

For example, two years ago Johnson Controls set up operation here. Johnson Matthey, the largest manufacturer of catalytic converters in the world is about to start production in what will be the largest plant for catalytic converters in the world.

The second sector where we see a lot of interest is from companies looking to outsource their customer service centers or business processes. Companies are also interested in the multi-lingual skills of our population that are conversant in several Balkan languages.

Macedonians are fluent in several languages with the heritage from Bulgarian, Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian and other neighboring nations. We are also interested in attracting investment in the IT sector. We are opening a new IT university next year that will graduate 800 people every year.

Agriculture has been a large part of the economy, especially the organic farming of fruits and vegetables.

These quality organic and natural foods are certainly opening the doors for large scale exports to new countries. At the same time we have companies from Israel and Gulf states growing crops in Macedonia to export to home markets or to third markets.

We are looking for investment in food production companies where they would do the assorting, packaging and processing of food to sell in third markets with value additions.

Our laws in real estate ownership were only recently reformed, and they now permit foreigners to own land and other properties. But because of this lag we also avoided recent economic contraction in the regional economies that depended on real estate investments.

However, we see interest in construction of office space, industrial real estate such as logistics centers and warehousing. Retail shops and shopping centers are also attractive to investors as Macedonia lacks retail square footage per capita in the region. Even building of single family homes and apartments are also attractive to investors.

Q: What will be few investment projects that were recently completed?

A: First of all, major international banks are looking at Macedonia for expansion of their services. Societe Generale from France entered Macedonia last year. Erste Bank from Austria is one of the largest investors in the country. Austrian banks are one of the largest players in Eastern Europe. We have Sisecam, the largest Turkish glass manufacturer and fourth largest in the world, interested in Macedonia.

Haier from China, which is the fourth largest electronics company in the world, is partnering with us. TriView from Korea has also chosen Macedonia as the location for their European plant for LCD TVs, computer monitors, laptops and Pcs.

So far many of the products that are made in Macedonia are components or parts that go into some sort of final products, but in the case of TriView and Haier, they will make products with their brands and a label ''Made in Macedonia.'' This will not only help the image of the country in international markets but will also boost the country''s confidence.