The Middle East

In the interests of further economic integration and development, the GCC agreed to create a $20bn fund in March 2011 to develop Oman and Bahrain. Under the plan each state is to receive some $10bn in funding as part of the Gulf Development Fund. Independent of this money, Bahrain can also count on $2.5bn from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic...

A good transport system is a key enabler in any economy, but in the case of Bahrain, an island country, this holds particularly true. Although the nation has relatively small reserves of oil and gas, it has historically been a trading centre, and in the 1970s and 1980s it emerged as the main entrepôt for the Gulf region. As an open economy with a...

Although the unrest of 2011 has had a knock-on effect in many sectors of the economy, one area which has held up relatively well has been the hotel segment. During the rapid economic growth in Bahrain in the 2000s, a great deal of money found its way into real estate, and within that sector, the hotel industry offered promising returns.

There are only three possible entry points to Bahrain: by airport, by the King Fahd Causeway (which links the island to Saudi Arabia) and by port. With the bulk of Bahrain’s imports and a large proportion of its exports entering and leaving by sea, the strength of maritime transport is thus something of a barometer for the overall economic health of...

With a long history as a pioneer in the Gulf region, Bahrain was the first country to discover oil in the 1930s. It was also the first to face the issue of declining reserves, replacing reliance on hydrocarbons by developing one of the first heavy industries in the region, Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), in the mid-1960s. During the 1970s and 1980s the...