At the height of Dubai’s recent boom, thousands of foreigners were arriving every day to seek their fortunes in this Gulf city of boundless ambition. Now, vehicles in the car park outside the airport gather dust as redundant expatriates abandon their wheels, fleeing home before they default on automotive loans and risk imprisonment.
Officials in the emirate were until the last few months unruffled by the credit crisis and a dramatic fall in oil prices, arguing that the services-led economy had not been affected. Indeed, they maintained, it would provide a safe haven for bankers and western companies suffering from the global downturn.
Dubai’s six-year boom, which rode the regional petrodollar wave, was fuelled by the city’s infrastructure and quality of life rather than by oil itself, of which the emirate has little. But the very openness of an economy built on finance and property investment now leaves it ill-placed to weather the storms raging elsewhere.
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