Oliver Cornock: ALL BLOG POSTS
Among the GCC countries, Bahrain was in many senses the first to fully embrace the need to diversify its revenue streams away from hydrocarbons. The arrival of banks from Lebanon in the late 1970s gave it a head start in developing financial services and, in particular, offshore investment fund activity. This has stood the economy in good stead, but competition in sectors targeted for diversification, such as financial services, logistics, industry and tourism, has risen dramatically.
Decades of growth in trade and foreign investment have seen the economies around the world become more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. The production of goods and, increasingly, the provision of services have become fractured across borders as corporations create and integrate into regional and global value chains. These trends have been reinforced by the steady liberalisation of international trade and investment regimes, at the bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral levels. National economic specialisation in areas of comparative advantage, and regional economic and political integration, have proceeded in a single direction, broadly speaking, since the 1980s. On aggregate, advanced economies have benefitted from and have championed these developments, while emerging markets have become the main drivers of growth around the world.
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of humanity was living in urban areas. Perhaps the most remarkable observation about this trend is the speed at which it has happened: as recently as 1900 urban areas accounted for 13% of the global population. Towns and cities are seen as the crucibles of opportunity for many rural dwellers.