About United Arab Emirates (UAE)

The United Arab Emirates (also the UAE or the Emirates) is a Middle Eastern country situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia on the Persian Gulf, comprising seven emirates: Abu Dhabi, Ajmān, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. Before 1971, they were known as the Trucial States or Trucial Oman, in reference to a nineteenth-century truce between Britain and several Arab Sheikhs. The name Pirate Coast has also been used in reference to the area's emirates in the 18th to early 20th century. It borders Oman and Saudi Arabia.

The country is rich in oil and, although it lacks other natural resources, it expects recent additional economic diversification to draw more financial and banking firms. The United Arab Emirates is a highly prosperous country after it gained foreign investment funding the desert-and-coastal nation in the 1970s.

The country has a relatively high Human Development Index, or HDI, for the Asian continent.

Economy

United Arab Emirates has the fifth highest GDP per capita in the world. Though current GDP per capita contracted by 42% in the 1980s, successful diversification helped register positive growth of 48% in the 1990s.

The UAE has an open economy with a high per capita income and a sizable annual trade surplus. Its wealth is based on oil and gas output (about 33% of GDP), and the fortunes of the economy fluctuate with the prices of those commodities. Since 1973, the UAE has undergone a profound transformation from an impoverished region of small desert principalities to a modern state with a high standard of living. At present levels of production, oil and gas reserves should last for over 100 years.

Despite higher oil revenues in 1999, the government has not drawn back from the economic reforms implemented during the 1998 oil price depression. The government has increased spending on job creation and infrastructure expansion and is opening up its utilities to greater private-sector involvement.

Extracted from Wikipedia