Diplomacy and International Politics

"Capital-rich and labour-poor. This is how the curse of the Gulf States was described fifty years ago. The world’s largest oil stocks had just been discovered under the earth’s most arid and depopulated region. With oil internationally recognised as the property of the state and not of the company that did the pumping, the scarcely populated states of the Gulf acquired enormous wealth. From the largest and oldest (Saudi Arabia) to the tiniest and youngest (Qatar), all six Gulf states soon faced income surpluses with population shortages, to which they all responded by importing labour. In just five decades, the Gulf, which for centuries had received only small population flows, became the world’s third largest receiver of global migrants after the United States and the European Union."