Saturday, 8 December 2012

Dubai, boom or doom?


Well, the signs are great, home prices are up, rent is up, a lot of new cafes and restaurants, lots of new shops, the new mall is going to be built with a 101 hotels, we are building up for the expo 2020, many new schools, new universities, and many new families that are moving to Dubai to avoid the Arab spring and the stuff that it had created! Do I mention more positives? Well we all got an SMS from Sheikh Mo himself congratulating us for the 41st anniversary of UAE's national day, in actual fact I got 4 SMS's as I have two phone numbers, so I got two in Arabic and two in English.  Don't forget that many new businesses had been established since the latter end of this year, thus the outlook is great. Congratulation Dubai, you have done it again!!  

Right, all of the above is great, however when you have to spend hours on the roads to reach your destinations, when you plan your meetings around the traffic jams' time, when you have to queue for hours when you go to supermarkets and shops, when you have to wait in a row of people waiting to be served, when your child is on the waiting list of some mediocre schools, and when your salary doesn't match what you have to pay in rents (everything has a time lag), then we cannot say that what we are experiencing is great? What shall we call this?

In Economics the researchers depend on statistics. Of course everyone knows that statistics are dangerous as numbers are taken in isolation and never been linked, who wants to have 1.21 of children are not happy in school? I don't want my child to be the 0.21  (I must say my grandchild) he or she are a whole human beings, so statisticians have to be careful and must link, correlate  and contradict. So if statisticians want to write the Dubai story, then they must look at both sides of the coins and portray to us in layman language what we should do to avoid the mishaps of a great economy.

It is the responsibility of the advisers to the kings to talk about the negative sides and the economic booms especially those that will occur when the curve is going up and when the curve is going down.  The advisers should not just be cheering the kings and telling them how marvelous their ideas are and how great the country would be, they should also highlight to the executors of the ideas that they should be careful and to draw a Gantt chart to show the good stuff and the peripheries that are going to result from those great ideas.  They were not hired to just be cheer leaders, they are there to check the blind sides too.



Suad Alhalwachi (Ms)
Director, Education Zone
Knowledge village
Building 2B, Office F30
Dubai, UAE
Postal Address
P.O. Box 214592
Dubai, UAE
Tel- 009714 3910258
Fax- 009714 3664512
suad@ezone.ae

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like it has the potential to be good but still many things to work on- progress is never ending.

    Velva

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  2. Hello Velva, hope you are fine, Dubai is a work in progress, I have been living here since 1981 and on a daily basis there is a road that is being built, a bridge is erected, a building is planted and so on. I am part of this change, hence no one can tell my age, Dubai grows younger and so am I. Hope you are enjoying my blog.

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