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.
