UAE: Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi has surpassed 1m hotel guests for the first half of the year and seems likely to achieve its tourism aims for 2011, although increased competition could eat into margins in the longer term.

Abu Dhabi is looking to increase the role industry plays in its burgeoning economy, stepping up investments in leading manufacturing sectors with an eye to building export markets in the medium term and laying the foundation for a more advanced industrial base in the longer run.

Bucking the trend in most MENA financial markets, the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) has performed well of late, rebounding strongly from the financial crisis and avoiding more recent downturns that some exchanges have experienced.

While health and safety is at the core of Abu Dhabi’s initiative to close villa schools, the push will also have positive knock-on effects for the local construction sector by creating opportunities to build educational facilities to replace them.

Economic expansion and upcoming real estate regulations look set to help Abu Dhabi’s property market, where lower investor demand and an increase in residential and office supply have combined to encourage a drop in rental rates.

Although it is a relatively newcomer to the local economy, Abu Dhabi’s aerospace industry is proving admirably nimble in its development. As part of the emirate’s long-term development plan, Economic Vision 2030, which was released in early 2009, policy experts highlighted aerospace as one of the many areas in which they envisage future growth, with this expected to play a key role in efforts to diversify the economy away from its traditional mainstay, hydrocarbons.