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And the oil. Everything in Dubai is funded by oil either directly because of subsidies or indirectly because it brings people to a region that is otherwise essentially an enormous empty desert.
Do you think people would go to las Vegas if there weren't casinos there?
Oil makes up 30% of UAE’s GDP and an even smaller percentage of Dubai’s: only 1% according to this Wikipedia article. Dubai is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE. Dubai has existed prior to the discovery of oil as a fishing and trade port, and has been rich before due to pearl diving. It was a major source of pearls before the Japanese invented cultured pearls.
For thousands of years, most seawater pearls were retrieved by divers working in the Indian Ocean, in areas such as the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and in the Gulf of Mannar (between Sri Lanka and India).[10] A fragment of Isidore of Charax's Parthian itinerary was preserved in Athenaeus's 3rd-century Sophists at Dinner, recording freediving for pearls around an island in the Persian Gulf.[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_hunting
The following map shows Bronze Age trade routes in purple:
There are good reasons to hate the UAE such as hosting US soldiers and normalizing with Israel. No need to lie about their history and origin.
Yeah, I don't think pearls or trade is making Dubai that rich anyhow any more. Especially after the Suez and like you said "cultured pearls.”
Neither is oil. The experience of losing pearl money and going poor for some years before oil was discovered is what motivated them to plan moving away from oil decades ago.
They are rich from trade though.
Trade makes up 26% of it's GDP. That's the largest contributor.
Trade in what, that makes no sense... Oil and gas exports make up 85% of its economy
Once a city gets big enough it can be self sustaining from the people that live there and tourism even if manufacturing or resource extraction dies.
Do you think people would go to las Vegas if there weren't casinos there?
This is an even more apt comparison because the Mafia started setting up those casinos out in the middle of the desert so they could do so in a place where they could control all the laws