The Asso­ci­ated Press released a pretty good analy­sis on the global recession’s effects on Dubai. Peo­ple from through­out the Arab world flocked to the city for it’s plen­ti­ful jobs. Once the reces­sion hit those jobs were cut. Now Dubai is expe­ri­enc­ing what most of the Arab world has, high unem­ploy­ment and low wages.

From this AP arti­cle that we found today at NPR, we read more about the bad news that the reces­sion brought.

It is bad news for the Arab world, where chronic eco­nomic stag­na­tion, high unem­ploy­ment and low-paying jobs have long caused frus­tra­tion among work­ers, espe­cially the young.

Over­all, the amount of money shipped back home by work­ers abroad, called remit­tances, fell by more than 7 per­cent in 2009 across the Mideast and Arab north Africa, the World Bank esti­mates. That is the first drop in a decade.

In some coun­tries the impact is worse: Worker remit­tances into Egypt have already plunged nearly a quar­ter over the past year, the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund said in October.

Arab work­ers go to many places for jobs, includ­ing Europe. But the oil-rich Gulf has long been the bedrock of Mideast remit­tances, with Dubai recently its most tur­bocharged engine.

Dubai built itself into a boom­ing trade and tourism hub on the backs of for­eign work­ers like Tamimi, whose fam­ily orig­i­nally hails from the West Bank town of Hebron. Only about one in 10 of Dubai’s roughly 1.5 mil­lion res­i­dents is a citizen.

Expa­tri­ate Arabs are not the only for­eign­ers hurt by Dubai’s down­fall. Low-paid Indi­ans and other South Asians pro­vide much of the hard labor to raise sky­scrap­ers includ­ing the world’s tallest, the Burj Khal­ifa, which opened this week. Fil­ipinos fill many of the ser­vice jobs.

But in per-capita dol­lar terms, it is the Arab world that’s being hit hardest.

Over­all, worker wages from the Gulf — includ­ing Dubai and other places like Saudi Ara­bia and Kuwait — account for a whop­ping 15 to 20 per­cent of the econ­omy in coun­tries like Jor­dan, Lebanon and Egypt that are con­sid­er­ably poorer than the oil-fueled monar­chies of the Gulf, said Nasser Saidi, a for­mer Lebanese gov­ern­ment min­is­ter who is now the chief econ­o­mist at the Dubai Inter­na­tional Finan­cial Cen­ter, a state-run bank­ing hub.

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