Dubai is absolutely economically broken lol. The city was built on cheap foreign slave labor. And the luxurious amenities of the city are only for the wealthy royal and foreigners. Their main export besides oil is the illusion of a thriving metropolis
The example I like to use to demonstrate how broken labor vs. service costs are in the UAE is to compare the price of a Big Mac meal to the price of a standard manual car wash (closer to detailing tbh).
In the UAE, a Big Mac meal costs approximately 35 AED ($10). On the other hand, a manual car wash - approx. 1-2 hours of labor - can cost you around 20 AED.
In other words, you could get almost two manual car washes for the price of a Big Mac.
(1) the middle class (and above) who have money to spend on services
(2) the migrant working class, the bulk of whom send every last extra penny back home as remittances to support family
The second class of people are not considered as a market for the majority of services in the UAE. In the case of food, when they do eat out, they frequent traditional, low cost/quality establishments.
As for why a Big Mac costs that much, labor definitely doesn’t have much to do with it. My impression is that prices continued to get pushed up as long as sales didn’t take a hit, which means it’s mostly pure profit.
Keep in mind that the median salary isn’t that high. Without looking it up, I would guess it’s approx $25k USD/year, but I haven’t lived there in a while.
To the extent that a dictatorship is doing well, it is evidence against the idea that democracy is the natural way to have a good economy.
That said, I don't think those states are doing *well enough* to justify such a fear. What we're looking at from the outside are basically the promo reels from a version of Disney Land made for people whose childhood dream wasn't to be a princess or a knight, but a CEO with a Lambo; what the kids see when they visit Disney has little in common with the effort needed to present the park.
AKA the most sensible economic model for Dubai. It's a nice enough metropolis for the desert, entices enough high end talent to live there to supplement frankly undereducated population a few generations away from nomads, and locals are comfy. What else they going to do with oil money in the desert.
They're just arbitraging cheap labour in your face instead of some farm field or factory overseas. For resource to local population ratio, it's supremely optimized - cheap migrant workforce does all the shit job locals don't want to do, don't have the numbers to do, without need for onerous social safety net of citizenship.
It's economically "fine", as in as "fine" as can be trying to pivot desert city from oil. It's morally broken because labours occasionally be slaves, even though largely everyone wins. UAE gets cheap labour, labour countries get remittance, labourers get life changing pay.
Like west already does this shit in some sectors (agri) and get cheap calories, UAE can't supply enough labour in all sectors and get cheap everything.
