Word: gulf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saif Ahmed began living the Dubai dream five years ago. The University of Toronto business school grad moved to the Gulf city-state and quickly co-founded property developer Universal Canlink Inc. By 2006, the firm was turning over $15 million a year as its brochures lured foreign investors with tales of "meteoric" growth in the Dubai real estate market. Now, as the global credit crisis spirals from Wall Street to the Middle East, Ahmed is coming back down to earth. There's still interest, he explains, but the buying frenzy in Dubai is gone. "Before, people were buying blindly...
...main conventional arms supplier, China has played an integral part in building Pakistan's nuclear weapons industry. In turn, Islamabad allowed the Chinese to build a deep-sea facility in Gwadar, a $250 million project that, once completed, will give Beijing an immensely strategic listening post on the Persian Gulf...
...Today, China, the gulf nations and other state capitalists have amassed the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. The world's state oil companies control some 90% of global energy resources. (Many of these companies invited in private investors in the 1990s only to throw them out later.) And by protecting parts of their economy at a time of massive global business consolidation, the state capitalists have built companies capable of competing, and winning, in industries that require scale. According to a study by the American Enterprise Institute research organization, unfree states have grown faster than politically free ones...
...critics, the plan smacks of oil-fueled excess, an attempt to one-up rivals on the mad dash across the Arabian Peninsula to build the tallest, biggest, glitziest structures. Their coffers bulging with surpluses, many Persian Gulf states are turning their desert into one giant construction site. There's the City of Silk project in Kuwait, Dubailand in Dubai and any number of ports, airports, universities and giant residential and industrial complexes abuilding in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and elsewhere. KAEC "is not a vanity project, but there is definitely a statement being made," says a Riyadh businessman who asked...
...lites, who are often Western-educated). Reforms are under way, but it will be years before Saudi universities are churning out world-class engineers in the numbers the country needs. Nor can businesses expect to simply import employees, which has long been the norm in the Persian Gulf economies: mindful of that youth bulge, Riyadh is imposing a "Saudi-ization" program that requires businesses to hire more locals. It doesn't help that employers don't have access to half the potential workforce: despite some recent gains for women, only small numbers of them have overcome the stiff cultural resistance...