Ask a lot of people have you been to the Middle East and they'll say yeah Dubai been shopping there been on holiday there.it's brash it's flashy it's successful.but there's a lot going on beneath the
Surface in Dubai that we don't
Necessarily see it's often described as
being oil-rich it isn't less than 5% of its GDP comes from oil it's got a bit of gas but it essentially has made its success through diversifying into property real estate aviation trade banking finance there are still people alive today who can remember the old Dubai pre boomed by when it was low-rise .where it was really just a port on the Gulf today it's absolutely brimming with skyscrapers nearly 200 of them people often say it is the city of cranes it's home to the tallest building in the world the Burj Khalifa at eight hundred and thirty meters and this transformation happened really in the space of one generation largely thanks to the ambition of the previous ruler ship rashid al maktoum who developed dubai from being just a transit stop into a destination the son Sheikh Mohammed the current ruler then accelerated that development One of the problems that sometimes
happens in Dubai is that people get lured into perhaps a full sense of relaxation you've got beaches bars nightclubs alcohol is freely available there and yet the actual rule of law of the place is quite strict and conservative there is no freedom of expression at all there you voice anything against the government you put out a tweet that they don't like and you're in real trouble there are many many cases of Westerners taking a wrong turn getting arrested and finding themselves in trouble like they'll drink a glass of wine publicly on the suite or they'll embrace and kiss a member of the opposite sex in 2018 there was a British PhD student who was doing a doctorate on security in the UAE he was arrested and accused of spying .he was eventually released but not until after five months in solitary confinement there is a paradox between the public face of Dubai which is incredibly welcoming very relaxed and a lot of alleged human rights abuses one of the most contentious issues about not justified that all the Gulf Arab states is the cheap manual labor that is hard in thousands and these people tend to be coming from the citation continent often they are cheated out of their wages out of the full amount of wages they're held in terrible conditions in many cases there's been a lot of documentation about this so legally the federal NUI laws are very strict on this but in practice these laws are often floated. Dubai is there's no question about it
a massive player on the global stage in terms of human development and innovation of green biotech of electronics of travel of aviation so.it's a force to be reckoned with it sometimes even reaches itself and there will be large areas of real estate that are only half built and get abandoned but it takes risks and so far I think most people would say it's probably paid.
