Word: saudi
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...shape than their badly bruised neighbor. The gulf region is poised not only to recover from the global slump this year, but could become the second most important center of world economic growth after the economies of east and south Asia, according to John Sfakianakis, chief economist for Banque Saudi Fransi in Riyadh and Crédit Agricole in Paris. "The world has always been too focused on Dubai, but Dubai is not the GCC," he says, referring to the Gulf Cooperation Council, a loose political and economic union of gulf nations. "In the short term, Dubai's problems...
Other countries in the gulf are spinning the same line: cherry-picking the best of Dubai while avoiding the worst. Saudi Arabia, the region's behemoth, has ambitious plans for new development, and Riyadh, its capital and biggest city, is bound to host the central bank for a proposed future gulf single currency. But for all its shopping malls and skyscrapers, Riyadh will never be the region's financial center so long as there is no place for investment bankers to celebrate their deals by popping champagne corks. Most global professionals don't want to live in a country where...
Kuwait may be less conservative than Saudi Arabia, but its ban on alcohol is also a major stumbling block to becoming a tourism and professional services hub. Bahrain - another of Dubai's challengers in financial services - has a thriving banking industry and the most ethnically and religiously diverse local population in the gulf. But its tolerant feel is threatened by tensions between the élite Sunni minority and the less powerful Shi'ite majority, as well as Islamist political parties that have benefited from the kingdom's tentative experiments with democratic elections. (See 10 Things to Do in Dubai...
...returned. The past two years have seen coups in Guinea and Mauritania and the tit-for-tat assassinations of the President and army chief in Guinea-Bissau. More recently, the regional superpower, Nigeria, endured three months of political uncertainty when President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua underwent medical treatment in Saudi Arabia but refused to hand over power to his deputy for three months. (The transfer was eventually forced by parliament.) And on Friday, two people were reported to have died in Ivory Coast during protests against President Laurent Gbagbo's decision to dissolve the government and electoral commission, once again...
...last November the president, a chain smoker who has been ill for years, left for Saudi for treatment for a heart condition from where he is yet to return, and the peace process - and all Nigeria - were left in limbo. In December, the main rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), announced it had lost patience with the delay and re-started its campaign of attacks on pipelines and installations and kidnappings of Western oil workers. A few thousand gunmen with a thing for shades, bandoliers and fast boats had the global price of crude...