The Middle East

With a new mortgage law in the works and government plans to spend nearly $70bn on low-income housing, Saudi Arabia’s real estate market appears on track for a period of expansion.

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.

Regional events are forcing Jordan to look past its traditional sources of energy, both in terms of feedstock and physical location. Disruptions in the supply of natural gas to the kingdom coupled with rising costs, mean it may look elsewhere for feedstock, while also pushing forward with its own nuclear energy programme.

Oman is scaling up investments in its electricity sector in a bid to boost production to meet spiralling demand. Plans are in hand to construct new power stations across the country and diversify sources of supply, though it will take some years before the Sultanate will have a comfortable cushion of excess generation capacity.

Tourism officials in Sharjah have adopted a hard-sell approach to promoting the emirate’s credentials as a travel destination, racking up frequent flyer points of their own as they criss-cross the globe to take part in tourism fairs and trade events. The success of this campaign will depend to some degree on the health of the economies of the countries targeted by the emirate’s promotional push.

Dubai’s economy is maintaining a steady pace of recovery, with confidence returning to the marketplace, investor appetite again being whetted and some of the longer-term development schemes starting to repay the faith and capital placed in them, though the need for care in managing the emirate’s debt burden remains key.