We are accustomed to thinking of foreign visitors to the UK as valuable invisible exports (try telling that one to anybody trying to walk up the escalators on the London Underground during the summer) but it has taken the Japanese to recognise that their own citizens represent potentially valuable invisible imports in the national battle to reduce the mountainous balance of trade surplus: NEC Corp wants to sell television sets in Egypt, Egypt doesn’t have any hard currency to pay for them, so NEC has teamed up with the Nittsu-Koku travel agency to launch the Great Cleopatra Scheme, sending 5,000 packaged camera-slingers a year to see the pyramids, so that the Egyptian government can use the yen they spend to pay for the TV sets.
