Economy

Adding to an already impressive list of firsts, Dubai’s neighbouring emirate of Sharjah added its first sovereign ratings at the beginning of 2014. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s (S&P) both place the UAE’s third-largest emirate well inside investment grade. Away from the glare of publicity, Sharjah was home to the first airport in the Gulf,...

If real estate bubbles divide into two simplistic categories – sellers’ deception and buyers unwilling to heed available information – then Dubai’s problems of four years ago were of the latter kind. In the US and elsewhere, mortgage salespeople propagated the idea that property ownership, often at unsustainable mortgage rates, was the key to future...

After Thailand withdrew its bid to stage the World Expo 2020, Dubai became the favourite to win, as São Paolo was thought to be too far away from much of the world’s population, and Yekaterinburg was slipping because Russia was suffering from (mainly Western) bad press, a phenomenon that equally applied to Izmir, Turkey. Weeks before the...

With each passing year, Dubai continues to further solidify its positioning as a regional and global hub for business and finance. As the emirate posted robust economic expansion across all sectors in 2013, its resilience in the years following the global economic downturn has helped to re-build confidence amongst the global business community....

London’s relationship with the Gulf has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past 200 years or so. Gone is the time when Britannia ruled the waves, doing deals to protect Gulf states in exchange for the control of foreign policy. Today, our ties with this booming region are far more reciprocal, a fact that a trip to any ultra-chilled,...