Although it seems inconceivable, the UAE is facing an enormous energy shortage. Much of the world views the UAE – and the rest of the Gulf countries by extension – as an inexhaustible reserve of hydrocarbons. However, as with many of the other Gulf countries, the UAE confronts a potentially far-reaching energy crisis. Despite increased energy production and imported Qatari gas through the Dolphin natural gas pipeline, UAE domestic gas demand substantially exceeds available supply. This disparity created a shortfall met by an increasing use of fuel oil, natural gas liquids, and in certain circumstances, coal. But it is natural gas that continues to be the UAE's most important domestic energy source.

This chapter explains the origins of the UAE energy crisis, forecasts developments for 2010–20, and posits recommendations for overall sector rationalization. If Emirati authorities take a proactive stance and address the structural elements of the natural gas shortage, the more extreme elements of the crisis would be mitigated without lasting damage to Emirati economic growth. As the UAE has prodigious natural gas reserves, slight modification of the natural gas pricing and the power sector tariff structures would be able to resolve the most serious issues facing the UAE in its drive towards industrialization and diversification.

Overview of the Emirati Gas and Power Shortage

The UAE has massive natural gas reserves.

Introduction

Letter writing was central to Elizabeth and John's lives for more than three decades. Their correspondence was a necessarily mutual endeavour that demanded willing commitment from both of them. They became, in a most memorable and apt phrase, ‘Coscribbler[s]’. They wrote their marriage into existence across three often difficult years of courtship conducted through correspondence, they sustained and nurtured that marriage through letter-writing, they offered one another succour and support across long pages, shared news and gossip, took decisions, worried out problems and evoked memories. Letter writing combated absence and dwelt in and built intimacy at a distance. Writing and receiving could deliver great pleasure – ‘Need I say the contents of [your last] have given me an infinite deal of pleasure. It has once more made my prospects happy and pleasing … and removed from my Breast such an [sic] heavy load it never before experienced’. Sometimes, though, they pained one another greatly with a misthought or expression or a misread word, an imagined neglect, or a post missed or misdirected. They wrote at snatched moments in the back rooms of shops in Rochdale, from home or warehouse, propped up in their sick beds and in the bedrooms of a hundred different inns.

This final chapter of the book first summarizes the conclusions drawn from each chapter, before returning to the initial questions and hypotheses raised in the Introduction. The chapter ends with a few overarching conclusions.

Chapter 1 argued that the Great Depression and World War II – both problems and goals for the future – influenced how economists thought about policy, inflation, interest rates, deficits and government intervention. Policymakers had a complicated relationship with their former allies and enemies as their world became more interdependent and appeared to require some kind of collective action. The Bretton-Woods Agreement, which had created the current monetary system as well as supranational institutions like the IMF, the OEEC (now OECD) and the World Bank, continued to play an important role in the development of solutions to payments imbalance and liquidity issues. Tensions began to build as US policies jeopardized confidence in the dollar, the primary medium of international trade, even as Europe and Japan were experiencing rapid economic growth. Economists in Europe and the USA were exploring solutions that included wholesale system change. An announcement by US Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon set a series of monetary system studies in motion by the IMF and Group of Ten – and also by Machlup, Triffin and Fellner, leaders of the Bellagio Group.

Introduction

Consumption is related to economic growth, standards of living, income distribution, urbanization, demographic structure and the modernization of a society, among other factors. Aggregate consumption has become a main source of data about living standards as it may capture welfare levels, and it is an indicator of standards of living as it constitutes an important component in people's welfare. The types of goods consumed in a society and their variations over time yield information about standards of living and income distribution in that society. The incorporation of new goods into the consumption basket may be a result of economic progress in the sense that it may contribute to improving people's welfare, if these goods improve life quality in its different aspects – food, housing, transport, recreation – or make it possible to maintain life quality at a lower cost.

The period from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until the Great Depression, is considered the ‘golden age’ for most of the Latin American countries. The region enjoyed rapid growth based on the export of natural resources, although it remained a net importer of manufactured goods. The first globalization was characterized by decreasing transport costs and increasing trade, and the internal prices of goods converged to international levels. This period of big exports and economic growth made it possible to import consumer goods.

I work with series of durable goods for the period from 1890 until the First World War for six countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay.

Migration has long been considered a modern phenomenon that grew to significant importance only in the long nineteenth century, during which Europe was transformed from a largely rural and agricultural society into a highly urbanized and industrialized region. Between 1750 and 1914 the number of people living in European towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants increased sixfold, while their proportion in relation to total population more than tripled from 12 to 42 per cent. In addition, the number of cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants expanded from 28 to 195, raising their proportion of total population from 3 to 13 per cent. Rural–urban migration has often been considered a major factor in achieving this spectacular growth in urban population. Older historiography and sociology regarded urban migration as both a salient symptom and the main vehicle of the ongoing modernization process, which was pushing people out of dwindling rural activities, and pulling them into more productive urban manufacturing. While large-scale migration was considered an essentially new and city-oriented phenomenon driving urban growth, migrants were in turn seen mainly as the desperate victims of rural uprooting. The increasing marginalization of rural income activities left them no other choice but to try their luck in cities, where they became the prime victims of the overcrowding and degeneration, which the unprecedented and unregulated growth of urban populations entailed.

Over the past decades, research in different domains has led to significant revisions of this powerful image of a one-off rural–urban population transfer in the course of the long nineteenth century. One fundamental revision is that migration was not such a new or modern phenomenon as implied in earlier visions. Several studies have by now amply demonstrated that also in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Europeans moved, in search of work, a career, a spouse or simply a better life, sometimes over long distances and often several times in a lifetime.

Introduction

The causes and historical determinants of development and economic growth or, conversely, the causes of backwardness and poverty, constitute one of the main problems that deserve serious attention in the field of economics and economic history. Not in vain the book that for many is the cornerstone of modern economics was entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Through the centuries many ideas and schools of though have developed, some of whom can be defined according to the typology of explanations they formulate with respect to this particular problem.

This paper is about the Prebisch-Singer (P-S) hypothesis on international trade, which was formulated in the mid-twentieth century, and which we interpret as an attempt to create an analytical framework to explain the growing gap in welfare and develop levels among different regions in the world from its trade relations. In this sense we can say that the P-S hypothesis belongs to the fields of both economics and economic history. This hypothesis, besides being a significant challenge to the hegemony maintained by the neoclassical theory of trade, was the theoretical base for trade policies of many countries in the periphery during the middle decades of the twentieth century and, even though its influence in economic policy has been undermined in the last three decades, remains fervently debated in economics and economic history literature.

Introduction

The role of Latin America in international markets has been broadly dealt with by many authors, most of them having emphasized the connections between trade openness of the region and economic development. In that sense, the timing of each growth period has been used, by part of the literature, to show successful stories of international market integration during the so-called first globalization. Such literature has drawn a picture of Latin America growing till the First World War at the same time as it was tightening its connection to international markets. The war has been said to have interrupted that process generating an enormous break through the decline in international trade. The literature of Latin American economic history has explained that break based on the strong decline in total trade volumes but also through the replacement of one main trade partner by another, that is the US replacing the UK.

Such interpretations refer to the whole Latin American region, but they in fact come from data of only few countries, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. Although these few countries have a big role in the region because they are very rich countries, they do not necessarily represent what was going on in the rest of the countries, the majority being smaller or much poorer. When we enlarge the sample of countries by including the rest of Latin America, the area's shared economic history changes a lot.

The German attack on Norway on 9 April 1940 tore apart the ties between the parent company in Canada and the subsidiary in Kristiansand. The mine and the smelter were safely located on the American side of the Atlantic, while the refinery was in German-occupied territory.

Wartime often places severe strain on international enterprise. Plants and property get damaged, sequestrated or used for war-related purposes. Foreign-owned enterprises are perhaps especially vulnerable. This chapter examines how Falconbridge and its Norwegian subsidiary developed during the Second World War. How did the German occupying powers treat the allied-owned company and how did the refinery in Kristiansand fit in with their plans? What strategies did the plant management follow? These types of questions have so far received limited attention in business history research. At the end of the chapter, we will sum up the war's effects on the subsidiary and on its relations to the Canadian mother company.

Falconbridge at War

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 the British and the Canadian Government made an all-out effort to prevent the enemy from gaining access to raw materials and products. As a Canadian company of military significance, Falconbridge and its Norwegian subsidiary were naturally part of the economic warfare against Hitler's Germany. However, the grim realities of war soon became clear. The first vessel laden with matte was torpedoed in late September. The connection between Canada and Norway had now become the company's weakest link.

Introduction

Unlike what occurred in the central zones of the Spanish Empire in America, the Cuban and Chilean economies grew and modernized from the end of the eighteenth century. The expansion rate of production oriented to export markets appears to have been a stimulus for the modernization of productive structures and institutions. From early on, fossil fuel consumption, mainly coal used in steam engines, adapted to the economic activities of Cuba and Chile. In the early nineteenth century, this was a powerful sign of the adaptation of modern technologies in peripheral economies. Cuba and Chile's lead position in the consumption of modern energies (coal, oil and hydroelectricity) throughout the nineteenth century was also related to the existence of an elite which was capable of generating a stable political order that favoured business and promoted institutional modernization, though without losing its oligarchic character. It was probably the oligarchic character of the political order which proved to be an obstacle to the conversion of economic growth into long term economic development.

Economic Modernization on the Periphery

In recent years, the explanation for the economic backwardness of Latin America has been based on three ideas which, despite their solidity, can be revised and enriched in the light of a study of the Cuban and Chilean experience. The first of these ideas suggests that adverse institutional situations, represented by the political chaos inherited from the wars of independence, would have been an insurmountable obstacle to social, political and economic modernization.

Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast in August 2005, including the casino city of Biloxi, Mississippi. A few days after the hurricane, city residents were still struggling with devastation but a few small businesses began to reopen. One of these was the International Food Mart, owned by Imelda Duvane. The store catered to Filipino casino workers and featured items such as sardines in tomato sauce, coconut gel and duck eggs dyed fuchsia, supposedly good for the libido. Like Atlantic City, Biloxi's casinos had attracted a diverse set of employees who established their own unique communities amidst the golden economic opportunities.

By the late 1990s, the ethnic communities and diverse residents of greater Atlantic City were not exactly out of the sight lines of casino visitors. Collectively, immigrants had become a major force in the labour-intensive casino industry of Atlantic City; by then, they predominated as table dealers, slot machine attendants, cashiers, valets, waiters, busboys, cleaners, cooks and room service attendants. Yet, ethnic diversity and global sensibility were hardly associated with Atlantic City. Most casino customers hardly noticed who was cashing their slots vouchers or bringing them drinks to accompany their buffet meals, though some may have noticed the increasing numbers of immigrants working in the casinos or in the stores alongside Atlantic Avenue. The immigrants who populated the casino industry in Atlantic City were hidden in plain sight from the millions of casino patrons, yet they contributed powerfully to the remaking of the old resort town into a dynamic, diverse and thriving American casino community.

The new immigration of Atlantic City's casino era actually replicated the earlier experience of earlier generations in the region. Between 1880 and 1920, there was a strong wave of immigration to the city and, by the early twentieth century, it was extensively populated by foreign immigrants: Jewish, Italian and Irish primarily. By about 1910, the Ducktown neighbourhood (around Atlantic and Arctic Avenues in the middle part of the city) had become an immigrant enclave for multitudes of Italians who migrated to the region.

Introduction

The last Basle meeting of officials and academics in 1977, funded by the Bank for International Settlements, was the final group meeting organized by Machlup, Triffin and Fellner. On several occasions in the early 1970s, there had been discussions at the Ford Foundation of the wisdom of continuing to fund Machlup's meetings after so many years.

In some important ways, including the early membership, the Group of Thirty (as the group would be called) was an extension of the Joint Meetings of Officials and Academics established by Fritz Machlup in 1964, but it was not a similar forum for private discussion.

In a paper written on the thirtieth anniversary of the Group of Thirty, Peter Kenen confirmed that the Bellagio Group so named would not meet again until 1996, when Andrew Crockett, the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), asked Kenen to put together a meeting of academics, central bankers and officials from the finance ministries of the major industrial countries, as well as the chief economists of the BIS, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The group continues under the leadership of Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and politics at the University of California, Berkeley. It meets once each year and is financed by the participating central banks. The Rockefeller Foundation, owner of the Bellagio estate, also uses the name Bellagio Group for the varied conferences and activities conducted there.