When the oil runs out (or alternatives become cheaper), this will be a ghost town. Heck, the whole country will collapse. No more oil, no more slave workers.
Can't wait.
Can't wait.
A lot of us western expats have headed to greener shores; the oil boom in Azerbaijan is one draw, a lot of the build-up in Qatar at the gas fields is another, and Western Australia is also helping things along quite a bit.
Wage rates for expats have fallen through the floor in the middle east as well - where one once could make a king's ransom in a year or two in the sand trap, now it's not so much the case, even in Saudi Arabia.
Now, it's not my favourite city, but I don't understand all the hate towards it. They've got a lot of oil money that's not going to last and they need to pivot to something else. Dubai is their attempt.
I would understand if they built something useful, something high-tech, like a CPU factory or some biotech stem cell research city. Instead they went for a caricature of Las Vegas, but with all kinds of laws against what normally is considered fun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/04/dubai-kissing-coupl...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-512815/Briton-jailed...
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-12-06/news/35654144_1_d...
http://www.nairaland.com/175589/russian-woman-arrested-dubai...
Of all the ME petrostates, UAE is by a long shot and then some the most liberal and has the most diversified economy. It's also moving the fastest towards becoming more liberal and getting a more diversified economy.
The kicker here, of course, is the meaning of being the most liberal "of all the ME petrostates" - the bar is not very high. That said, if you're married, western, well-paid, can keep your hands off your partner in public, don't routinely get obscenely drunk and don't do drugs (many, many people fall into this bucket without giving up any quality of life), you could find much worse places to live.
In my experience, the number of people who actually live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life is a far, far, far smaller number than the number of people who apparently live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life.
The greatest myth of modern Western society is that freaks are actually uncommon.
Being the best among the worst is not exactly a good indicator.
Dubai doesn't have a very diversified economy - 90% of exports is oil.
And I claimed no such thing. But there is value in comparing countries to comparable countries. In the case of UAE, that's Saudi Arabia, not Sweden.
> 90% of exports is oil.
Yeah, no. Dubai is a major trading hub with a significant financial and services sector. Oil accounts for just under half of exports of all of the UAE[1] - and the oil isn't in Dubai, it's in Abu Dhabi, so the local number for Dubai is likely much lower. The economy of both the UAE broadly, and Dubai specifically, is still deeply dependant on oil, and there's no doubt that a collapse in oil prices would be totally devastating to the economy. But, as previously stated, they are rapidly diversifying (while they have the money to do so), but this is a process with a horizon of several decades.