Why qatar is rich

More than two-thirds of Qataris, adults and children, are obese. Qataris benefit from free education, free healthcare, job guarantees, grants for housing, even free water and electricity, but abundance has created its own problems. In a society where Qataris are outnumbered roughly seven-to-one by expatriates, long-term residents speak of a growing frustration among graduates that they are being fobbed off with sinecures while the most satisfying jobs go to foreigners.

The sense is deepening that, in the rush for development, something important has been lost. Qatari family life is atomising. With children almost universally being raised by nannies brought in from the Philippines, Nepal or Indonesia, gaps of culture and outlook are opening up between the generations.

Umm Khalaf, a woman in her 60s, her features hidden behind a traditional batoola face-mask, described to me the "beautiful simplicity" of life in her youth.

It's painful to lose that family intimacy," she says. Out on the dusty plains west of Doha, at Umm Al Afai - roughly, the Place of Snakes - farmer Ali al-Jehani is treating me to a tin bowl of warm, foamy camel's milk, fresh from the udder. Others echo his sense of politicians being out of step with people, particularly with regard to the strenuous - and allegedly corrupt - effort made to bring the football World Cup to Qatar, and the unanticipated level of media scrutiny that has come with the turmoil of construction.

Mariam Dahrouj, a journalism graduate, adjusts her niqab while speaking of a sense of threat. We are a closed community, and they want to come and bring their differences. How can we express our values? Qatari society is defined by class, which is often linked to race. It is desperately unequal.

It also aims to create various kinds of opportunities other than oil, to promote economic growth. This involves looking at other potential exports and developing local talent. Ever since the QIA was formed back in , its success can be seen in the fact that it has, to this date, obtained billion US dollars of assets from the rest of the world. Speaking of being rich, Qatar is actually the richest country in the world, at least in terms of per capita GDP.

Again, this can be attributed to the fact that it is quite a small country that is blessed with the third largest oil reserve in the world. More than a year ago, Saudi Arabia and some of its allies have launched an economic embargo against Qatar, because the country was purported to be supporting Iran and its terrorist activities.

In this embargo, these Arab countries have closed land, sea, and air links against Qatar, hoping to deprive the rich tiny country. While this severely impacted Qatar in the beginning, it has since stabilized by using its huge finances to pay for imports, and now has enough assets to pay for its shortages until a hundred years from now.

Over the years, Qatar has created projects that aim to become self-sufficient. This includes building the Hamad Port, which aims to be a mega port in the region.

Qatar also spent million dollars to build a huge dairy farm to become self-sufficient in terms of milk. Indeed, Qatar is the richest country in the world. In fact, it is currently spending tens of billions of dollars to create stadiums and other state-of-the-art facilities for the World Cup. That despite the many problems it is facing! Sign in. Log into your account. Forgot your password? Password recovery. Qatar is home to approximately 2. The extreme disparity is primarily due to the fact that Qatar, like many other countries in the region, attracted many male migrant workers from South Asia following its oil boom in the s.

In addition, foreign migrants amount to about 88 percent of the total population. Qatar used to be one of the poorest Gulf states, until the oil boom. But as oil reserves were discovered and developed in the s, the country and its high per capita incomes became more and more attractive to expatriates. Migrants mostly from South Asia changed everything — now making up about 94 percent of Qatar's workforce, The Guardian reported.