Quote:
Originally posted by Mad_Gecko
"Only country with a real economy" (apologies for the paraphrasing)? Hmmm... I think quite a few of those other countries have thriving economies, some of the most popular diving schools in the med are in Egypt. Dubai has the only seven star hotel in the world. Oil has driven the United Arab Emirates to be one of the richest nations.
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Actually, he's quite right. A lot of oil-exporting countries there have no real economy *besides that oil*. They usually import modern equipment, and rarely build anything themselves. Doing this ensures that when the oil runs out, they'll take a nose-dive into oblivion. (Note: Iraq seems to be an exception thanks to Saddam's insistence on developing his own weapons...)
You can compare the situation to Spain in it's golden age - tons of gold were taken from South-America, and overnight Spain became unimaginably wealthy. They imported everything their neighbors could come up with (also loads of clocks, them being the computer of the day). They didn't develop their own industry, and even went so far as to dismiss foreign inventions and knowledge - it was from protestant countries after all, and thus heretical and evil. When the gold ran out, their economy went downhill because the rest of the world had moved on while they remained static.