Oil-rich Gulf States Research Articles

Blockchain in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Opportunities for Regional Integration and Economic Growth

Composed of an assortment of countries with vast differences in economic and political development, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically been slow to embrace integration. The region consists of a diverse mix of countries with complex colonial legacies, ongoing warfare, tribal and religious enmity, and extreme wealth disparity. Recent advances in technology have the potential to enable greater cohesion and development. One such innovation is blockchain, an immutable distributed ledger technology that eliminates intermediaries and revolutionizes how transactions take place over the Internet. While originating as the technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has been applied in many other areas in which data integrity and transparency is vital and has been adopted around the world. This paper explores blockchain adoption in the MENA region, focusing on the financial systems, government policies, and innovation ecosystems within the member countries. Huge discrepancies in the levels of development and adoption of the technology in the MENA countries are revealed, with Israel and several of the oil-rich Gulf states being the most advanced. Examples of blockchain-related collaborations among MENA nations are presented and the future trajectory of blockchain adoption is explored. Keywords: MENA, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Middle East, North Africa, Regional integration

Estimates of Global Bilateral Migration Flows by Gender Between 1960 and 2015

Measures of international migration flows are often limited in both availability and comparability. This paper aims to address these issues at a global level using an indirect method to estimate country to country migration flows from more readily available bilateral stock data. Estimates are obtained over five and ten-year periods between 1960 and 2010 by gender, providing a comprehensive picture of past migration patterns. The estimated total amount of global international migrant flows is shown to generally increase over the 50 year time frame. The intensity of migration flows over five and ten-year periods fluctuate at around 0.6 and 1.25 percent of the global ectively, with a noticeable spike during the 1990-95 period. Gender imbalances in the estimated flows between selected regions were found to exist, such as recent movements into oil rich Gulf States from South Asia. The sensitivity of flow estimates to alternative input stock and demographic data as well as changes in political geography are explored.

Geopolitical Significance of Balochistan: Interplay of Foreign Actors

The geographical location of Balochistan makes it an important region. The province, being the best possible and the shortest route to the Arabian Sea, has attracted the key international and regional players, including China, India, the US, Iran, the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and Afghanistan. Each player wanted to utilise this region to pursue its geopolitical and geostrategic interests. The building of Gwadar port and the development of Balochistan under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is going to be a game changer for Pakistan’s socio-economic development. A fully operational Gwadar port will enhance Pakistan’s commercial activities and its connectivity with oil-rich Gulf states, the CARs, Afghanistan, China and with the rest of the world. Therefore, CPEC, under the Chinese One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, has enhanced the significance of the Balochistan province. However, it has also added to the concern of the adversaries of Pakistan and China, particularly India and the US. To counter the viability of Gwadar, India has started to invest considerably in the development of the Iranian Chabahar port. Since China’s rivalry with the US and India’s with Pakistan has been a recurring theme in the global and regional politics respectively. It is Iran’s strategic partnership with India, which has been stirring doubts in Pakistan. The episode of arrest of the Indian spy, Kulbhushan Jhadav, has confirmed the involvement of India’s intelligence agency — Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) — and endorsed all other reports on the foreign involvement in supporting the insurgency in Balochistan. In this milieu, this study is an effort to factor in the foreign elements in the current instability in the province.

Gulf Cooperation Council Countries and the Global Land Grab

A rapid increase in large-scale land acquisitions associated with the food-commodity price spike in 2008 resulted in a flurry of journalistic, non-governmental organization, and academic publications. One of the primary narratives that emerged was that oil-rich Gulf states were driving a “land grab” from resource-poor countries. However, little was known about who was making deals and where. This article assesses the extent to which the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are, in fact, primary players. We first compare the total number of deals and land areas involved, finding that individual GCC member states have been relatively minor players compared to the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Singapore, and Malaysia—each of whom, moreover, finalized more deals than all the GCC countries put together. We next compare the geographic distribution of acquisitions, comparing the trends for GCC member states with those of the major investing countries, and assess which countries have ac...

The Egyptian Coup, the United States, and a Call to Strengthen the Rule of Law and Diplomacy Rather than Military Counter-Terrorism

This article examines from a legal and historical perspective (a) the United States’ implicit ratification of the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the first fairly and freely elected Egyptian president and (b) how the perceived U.S. support for the coup contributes to Islamic terrorism. To guarantee that oil has been readily available (and during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism), the U.S. has supported secular, authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world, including the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and, initially, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, not to mention autocratic leaders of the tiny, oil-rich Gulf states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. This history and the U.S.’s implicit ratification of the Egyptian coup and the military’s violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood marginalize Islamic moderates, strengthen the extremists, and send the unmistakable message to Islamic fundamentalists that they cannot win by the ballot box, but only by violence. (Since the coup, terrorist acts in Egypt have increased exponentially.) Revolutionary developments in international law since the end of World War II may help guide the United States and its allies towards fashioning a counter-terrorism policy and practice relying less on armed force and more on diplomacy and law enforcement. After 1945, the international community has recognized human rights and outlawed torture; extrajudicial killing of a state’s own nationals; systematic racial, ethnic and religious discrimination; aggressive warfare; annexation; and a state’s acquisition of new colonies. The international community is now also moving to outlaw military overthrow of democratically elected leaders.What is usually left out of discussions on Islamic terrorism is that Russia and European nations colonized almost all Muslim countries. This colonization almost without exception led to exploitation of these countries, discrimination against Muslims, and to a conflict between secularists and Islamic fundamentalists. Although the U.S. had never colonized an Islamic nation, U.S. policies and practices since World War II, not to mention its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, led the U.S. in effect to assume the mantle of the former European colonial powers.Granted these examples of colonization and invidious discrimination generally took place before the international community declared them illegal, and international law applies only prospectively, not retrospectively. African-Americans, however, had suffered under the “separate but equal doctrine” before the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 declared the doctrine unconstitutional. Likewise, the pain, humiliation, and resentment engendered by conquest, colonization, and accompanying racial discrimination had been just as sharply felt by the people experiencing these practices before the international community formally outlawed them. Enlarging on the theme in my book, United States, International Law, and the Struggle against Terrorism (Routledge 2011), the article contends that Russia and the West (including Europe and the U.S.) have a moral, if not strictly legal, obligation to make reparation by fostering democratic institutions, the rule of law, and international human rights in the Islamic world. Implicitly ratifying the coup and the Egyptian military’s extreme violence in putting down protest eviscerates this final objective. If we are serious about reducing the threat of Islamic terrorism, we, with our European and other allies, have to stop applying a double standard to Arabs and Muslims, including their fundamentalists, and, instead, have to recognize and affirmatively address the suffering all peoples in the Middle East have experienced.

Policy Barriers to International Trade in Services: Evidence from a New Database

Surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services. Previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements, but in many cases, these commitments do not reflect actual policy. This paper describes a new initiative to collect comparable information on trade policies for services from 103 countries across a range of service sectors and relevant modes of service delivery. The resulting database reveals interesting policy patterns. Although public monopolies are now rare and few services markets are completely closed, the authors observe numerous second-generation restrictions on entry, ownership, and operations. Even in instances in which there is little explicit discrimination against foreign providers, market access is often unpredictable because the allocation of new licenses remains opaque and highly discretionary in many countries. Across regions, some of the fastest-growing countries in Asia and the oil-rich Gulf states have restrictive policies in services, whereas some of the poorest countries are remarkably open. Across sectors, professional and transportation services are among the most protected industries in both industrial and developing countries, whereas retail, telecommunications, and even finance tend to be more open.

African Land, Up for Grabs

Sheikh Saudi and Ethiopia, Arabia, Mohammed where spends Hussein he his was time born Ali shuttling Al in a Amoudi, village between 64 a years citizen Riyadh ago. of Sheikh Saudi A abia, spends his time shuttlin between Ri adh d Ethiopia, where he was born i a village 64 ye rs ago. The son of a Yemeni father and Ethiopian mother, Al Amoudi boasts an estimated net worth of $10 billion. He is the richest Ethiopian and, according to Forbes, the 64th richest man in the world. Fortyfive years ago, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia and built his fortune in oil refineries and the booming construction industry. But Al Amoudi never lost touch with his homeland. In fact, Ethiopian real-estate has become a key part of his burgeoning portfolio. In 2009, Al Amoudi's company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, signed long-term leases for nearly 25,000 acres in the country's northeastern regional state, Gambella, to produce

OF MAIDS AND MADAMS

More than 100,000 Sri Lankan women leave their homes each year to seek employment as domestic workers in the Arab world. The oil-rich Gulf States remain the biggest recruiters, but demand has been rising sharply in Jordan, where few studies of the phenomenon have been undertaken. This article analyzes the social, economic, and political factors influencing the market for foreign domestic workers in Jordan and describes how demand there has been fueled by changes in class formation and kinship. It focuses on the largest group of domestic workers in Jordan— Sri Lankans — and draws on extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka as well as Jordan. The article explores the dynamic relationships between domestic workers and the families who employ them, arguing that an essential strategy used by both groups involves the construction of relations of dependency. The article also chronicles Sri Lankan migrants' experiences, suggesting that there are meaningful cohorts, which are differentiated by age, length of stay, and place of residence, that have distinct experiences, attitudes to the host country, and homeward orientations. The use of Christian worship and conversion as coping strategies are also described. The author argues that several factors relating to the ways paid domestic work are managed by the state, recruiting agencies, and employers have hindered collective action for workers' rights. In the absence of other forms of activism, faith-based networks fill the void, providing essential support to migrants in need.

A Falling Dollar Raises Inflation in the Gulf

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve System. Since the early 1980s, oil-rich Gulf states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates have pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, benefiting from the relative stability of U.S. monetary policy. After 2006, however, the weakening U.S. dollar and rising oil prices have increased inflation in these economies.1 A falling dollar contributes to inflation in dollar-pegged economies by raising the domestic-currency prices of tradable goods (such as manufactured goods and many types of food). Rising oil prices make individuals wealthier and encourage them to buy more tradable goods as well as nontradable goods (such as houses and land), increasing the relative prices of goods and services produced within the country. These Gulf states are now considering whether a dollar peg is in their best interest. In May 2007, Kuwait broke the dollar peg in favor of tracking an undisclosed basket of currencies, albeit one in which the dollar is believed to be heavily weighted. In mid-November, the governor of the United Arab Emirates’ central bank stated that the dollar peg has “served the economy...very well in the past. However, we have reached a crossroads.”2 But are the oilrich Gulf states at a crossroads or merely revisiting the same intersection? The chart shows the evolution of the dollar’s relative value and oil prices starting in 1980, when most currencies were pegged to the dollar; the table shows the inflation rates of these five economies averaged over three distinct time horizons: 1980-81, the last period of persistently high inflation; 1986-2003, which featured low but volatile inflation; and 2006-07, the current inflationary period. In the first period, a weak U.S. dollar and high oil prices both accompanied high Gulf-state inflation; whereas, in the second period, the more modest levels of exchange rates and oil prices accompanied low inflation. Over the past decade, the openness to international labor movements in some Gulf states might have helped keep inflation lower than it would have been otherwise: Notably, Qatar, which has 12 percent fewer migrant workers today than in the early 1980s, has seen much worse inflation recently.3 In sum, oil prices will not continue to rise and the dollar will not continue to fall forever. This recent spike in Gulf-state inflation, therefore, is very likely transitory and will probably not translate into persistent inflation.

Women in the Local/Global Fields of War and Displacement in Sri Lanka

War and displacement create specific local/global relationships. This article explores how globalization is not a universal, but a highly contested and contingent experience by analyzing local/global fields of war and displacement in the Sri Lankan civil war. The different involvement with globalization of two different groups of women—the women cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and internally displaced Muslim women working as migrant laborers in the oil-rich Gulf States—is explored. Intersecting spaces of gender, ethnicity and class are analyzed in order to show how specific actors with different social locations make use of their symbolic capital to deal with war and displacement and how these intersections in the local/global fields of war and displacement consolidate and contest social divisions and inequalities.

Aspects de l'évolution démographique récente dans les pays du Moyen-Orient arabe

Some aspects of the recent demographic evolution in the countries of the Middle East Over the past 25 or 30 years great progress has been made in the collection of demographic data in the Middle East. This has brought to light the fact that there has been a substantial decline in mortality which, coupled with the continuing high level of fertility in all the countries of the region, has resulted in an increased natural growth rate of 2.9 % per year, one of the highest growth rates in the world. The total population in the area has multiplied by 2.7 in the last thirty years, from 22 millions in 1955 to 59 millions in 1985. Some countries have experienced more rapid urbanization than others, resulting in an uneven distribution of population and with the greatest concentrations being in the major cities and more especially in the capitals. Since 1973 there has been an increase in intra-regional and international migration towards the oil-rich Gulf States, as well as an intensification of family grouping. The socio-economic impact of these changes and the resulting problems does not seem to have compromised the development in the region, partly due to the importance of the revenue from the oil producing countries.

L'émigration pakistanaise dans le Golfe et ses répercussions sur le pays d'origine

Pakistani emigration since the early 1970s has been primarily directed toward the oil-rich Gulf states. Over 2 million Pakistanis, 10% of the adult male workforce, now live outside their home country, 3/4 of them in the Gulf states. The emigration has shortterm advantages for Pakistan, which has a high unemployment rate and few other exports. 2 government bureaus and over 300 recruiting agencies encourage Pakistani emigration to the Gulf, and because of the foreign exchange earnings generated, such emigration has become an important concern of the government. Emigration has a long history in Pakistan as part of the migratory movements of the Indian subcontinent in general. Emigration in the 1960s was prompted by mechanization of agriculture and disturbances of traditional agrarian labor arrangements brought on by the Green Revolution. Concentrations of lands among the successful middle-sized producers led to a rural proletariat and exodus towards the cities, where possibilities of employment were scarce. Regions of declining income around the new capital of Islamabad were the 1st to take advantage of new employment opportunities in the Gulf states. Pakistani migration to the Gulf countries is temporary for individual workers, who stay an average of 3-6 years, but the effect is of chain migration as returning workers are replaced by other family members. Workers are not accompanied by family members and have almost no contact with the local Arab populations. They send most of their earnings to their families in Pakistan. 3/4 are under 30 years old, most are of rural origin, and the majority are from the northern provinces. Although 70% are married, only 4% of migrants, the most highly qualified, are accompanied by their families. About 41% are unskilled workers and 42.6% are semiskilled or skilled manual workers. In 1981, the average annual salary repatriated by a Pakistani working in the Gulf was $3000. The Pakistani government has not defined a migration policy but has established rules and procedures to curtail clandestine departures. Most migrants use the services of licensed private employment agencies and very few use public channels. Because the migration is relatively new and few studies have been done, it is difficult to evaluate its effects on the local economy. 1 result is a severe local shortage of labor, especially in construction and transportation, which has promoted inflation and particularly affected the most impoverished classes. Remissions are now the most important source of Pakistan's foreign exchange earnings, but are not being invested in economic, industrial, or agricultural development, which has remained stagnant while 55% of the national budget is directed to defense. Most migrant earnings are invested in housing, marriages and dowries, and luxury imported consumer goods. In the current state of Pakistan's economy, migration is the sole means of socioeconomic advancement for the vast majority, but the future of the movement is uncertain.

The modern development of nomadic living space in Southeast Arabia — the case of Dhofar (Sultanate of Oman) 1

Sweeping changes have recently taken place in the life and economic circumstances of nomadic peoples in the countries of the Islamic East. In this respect, the ‘small’ oil-rich Gulf states are in a somewhat different position. In contrast to many other countries with nomadic populations, the prospects for the integration of the non-sedentary elements of the population into the process of modern development are more favourable in the Gulf states, chiefly because of their wealth in oil. The Omani government has devoted special attention to the development of the nomadic environment in the southern province of Dhofar following the end of the Dhofar conflict. A speedy expansion of the technological and social infrastructure took place on the basis of a newly created central place system of government centres. This covered the extension or provision of transport facilities, water supply, education, rural health services, religious establishments, the distribution of basic requisites to the population and the stimulation of retail trade. Additional government measures comprised the construction of low-cost housing for refugees, the allocation of building sites, financial assistance to the socially deprived and subsidies to shaykhs, as well as various small-scale programmes for the improvement of agriculture, livestock and fisheries. A further essential contribution to modern development has been the creation of thousands of new jobs, above all in the state's public service sector. The effects of the new opportunities for employment, together with relatively high cash incomes now available for many nomadic families, can be seen in numerous changes. The most important new trends can be summarised as the decline of the caravan trade, the advent of motor transport, an increasing rate of permanent settlement accompanied by a switch to gardening, the practice of commuting to fixed employment instead of nomadism, dependence on external food and outside markets and economic dependence on allowances, standardized tents and stone houses in place of the traditional dwellings. It can generally be confirmed that the nomadic population of Dhofar has shared in modern development in a variety of ways. However, a marked gap in development exists between the coastal area in the south with its settled population and the nomadic living space in the interior of Dhofar. Only the speedy introduction of a development programme that caters for the specific interests of the nomads can satisfactorily achieve their ultimate integration. If such measures fail to materialise one must fear a long-term social and economic decline for the majority of nomads in Dhofar and their reduction to a marginal status.