Dubai: Expectation vs reality - BBC News

Ask many people if they have been to the Middle East and they will say yes. Dubai's been shopping, it's been on holiday, it's bold, it's flashy, it's successful, but there's a lot going on under the surface in Dubai that we don't necessarily see. It is often described as rich in oil. No less than 5% of its GDP comes from oil. It has a bit of gas, but essentially it has achieved its success through diversification into property, real estate, aviation, trading, banking, finance, there are still people alive. Nowadays, who can remember the old Dubai that flourished when it was low-rise, where it was really just a port on the Gulf?

Today it is absolutely packed with skyscrapers, almost 200 of them, people often say that it is the city of cranes, it is home to the tallest. build the world's Burj Khalifa at eight hundred and thirty meters and this transformation actually occurred in the space of a generation largely thanks to the ambition of the previous ruler Rashid Al Maktoum, who transformed Dubai from being just a transit stop to a destination. His son Sheikh Mohammed, the current ruler, accelerated that development. One of the problems that sometimes happens in Dubai is that people are drawn towards a feeling of total relaxation.

There are beaches, bars, discos, alcohol is freely available there and yet the real rule of law. The place is quite strict and conservative there is no freedom of speech there you express anything against the government you post a tweet they don't like and you are in real trouble there are many cases of Westerners taking a wrong turn: getting arrested and finding themselves in trouble , such as drinking a glass of wine publicly in the suite or hugging and kissing a member of the opposite sex. In 2018, there was a British PhD student doing a PhD in security. In the United Arab Emirates he was arrested and accused of espionage.

He was eventually released, but it wasn't until after five months in solitary confinement that there is a paradox between the public face of Dubai, which is incredibly welcoming, very relaxed, and a host of alleged human rights abuses, one of the The most controversial issues are that it is not justified that all Gulf Arab states have cheap labor that is hard in the thousands and that these people tend to come from the aforementioned continent, they are often cheated out of their salaries of the total amount of salaries they receive. held in terrible conditions in many cases there has been a lot of documentation about this, so legally the federal NUI laws are very strict about this, but in practice these laws often float around Dubai, there is no doubt about it, a massive player in the global scenario in terms of human development and innovation from green biotechnology to aviation travel electronics, making it a force to be reckoned with; sometimes it even reaches itself and there will be large areas of real estate that are only half built and abandoned, but you take risks and So far I think most people would say it was probably worth it.