Mohan Guruswamy
There is a delicious irony to the Dubai bust. From November 20-22 this year it played host to the World Economic Forum's Summit on the Global Agenda and where the so-called Dubai Model was lauded and touted as a recipe for emulation by others.
The WEF meeting in Dubai was supposed to do for it what the summer Olympics last year did for China!
While the Olympics were real as were China's many achievements, the Dubai Model and the WEF, both, have a fraudulent ring to them.
The WEF, despite its official sounding name, is really a Swiss NGO started and run by Klaus Schwab, a former business management professor at a small time college who managed to parlay an official sounding name and some plain old huckstering into a global movement propagating a free wheeling capitalism and by fostering boundless optimism on the ability of private sector managers to solve the world's problems.
Many of the WEF's early stars -- like Percy Barnevik of ABB -- have fallen by the wayside after being exposed as highly paid frauds with till-dipping proclivities, but the WEF has just kept growing by keeping one step ahead. As it did in Dubai last month.
Today the fading and tattered posters of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Makhtoum and airports choked with departing workers and managers tell the story of the economic mirage in the Arabian desert.
There is a delicious irony to the Dubai bust. From November 20-22 this year it played host to the World Economic Forum's Summit on the Global Agenda and where the so-called Dubai Model was lauded and touted as a recipe for emulation by others.
The WEF meeting in Dubai was supposed to do for it what the summer Olympics last year did for China!
While the Olympics were real as were China's many achievements, the Dubai Model and the WEF, both, have a fraudulent ring to them.
The WEF, despite its official sounding name, is really a Swiss NGO started and run by Klaus Schwab, a former business management professor at a small time college who managed to parlay an official sounding name and some plain old huckstering into a global movement propagating a free wheeling capitalism and by fostering boundless optimism on the ability of private sector managers to solve the world's problems.
Many of the WEF's early stars -- like Percy Barnevik of ABB -- have fallen by the wayside after being exposed as highly paid frauds with till-dipping proclivities, but the WEF has just kept growing by keeping one step ahead. As it did in Dubai last month.
Today the fading and tattered posters of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Makhtoum and airports choked with departing workers and managers tell the story of the economic mirage in the Arabian desert.
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