Qatar fashions financial oasis to go toe-to-toe with East and West

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As Dubai’s opera buffa ends in a mangle of half-built towers and unpaid debts, regional leadership is shifting along the Gulf coast to the seriously rich gas sheikdom of Qatar – where more intellectual rulers are creating a cross between Sweden and Switzerland in the sands.

Qatar is already the world’s wealthiest country with a per capita income near $75,000. It will soon be much richer. By 2012 it will be producing 5.5m barrels a day of oil-equivalent: half Saudi Arabia’s output, for a population smaller than greater Glasgow.

They could perhaps hope to live as rentiers for a hundred years, but wealth corrodes the soul and they learned from the 1970s oil shock that petro-dollars are fickle.