The Middle East

Medical tourism, pharmaceutical production and changes to insurance billing are the chief talking points in Dubai’s health sector at present. The private sector has led rapid growth in recent years, and while high average health spend and a favourable regulatory environment continue to encourage new hospital operators to enter the market, a...

Dubai’s appeal as a vacation destination and its increasing standards of health care are ensuring steady growth in the emirate’s medical tourism industry. At current rates of expansion, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) target of attracting 500,000 medical tourists by 2021 seems within reach, although it will require the help of the high influx...

While upstream oil and gas revenue provided much of the financing for Dubai’s early development, the emirate’s road to modernisation has been built around economic diversification. In recent years the government has focused on the expansion of midstream and downstream industries, alongside fundamental changes to power generation. Having...

With the Dubai government allocating $163bn to diversify its energy sector until 2050, including a $27bn fund for renewables, the emirate is rapidly emerging as a global centre for research and innovation for solar and other green power projects.

Aided by easier and cheaper travel, global tourism has experienced two decades of almost uninterrupted growth. According to the World Bank, the number of international departures more than doubled between 1997 and 2017, from 687m to 1.57bn per annum. With the global middle class estimated by US-based think tank Brookings Institution to expand...

With the long-awaited Expo 2020 just around the corner, attention in Dubai has already started to shift beyond the Expo to the emirate’s long-term prospects as a tourism destination. Passenger numbers at its airport, one of the busiest in the world, have not been unaffected by regional economic headwinds. Nor have hotel occupancy rates and...