Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Globalization and the Role of Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) comprises 18 countries, including the Arab countries, North Africa, and Iran. With a total population of 432 million in 2007. Demographers expect the population to increase to 700 million by 2050 [60]. The World Bank’s (2012) projection for population growth was 600 million by 2025. MENA serves as an international focal point attracting foreign companies by offering opportunities for new business relationships [8][39][69]. The selected nations are the largest countries in the region by demographic and economic size and share the same or similar cultures. The MENA region as a whole contains two-thirds of the world petroleum reserves; however, multiple challenges besiege the region including political instability, social tensions, and an increase in population size [50][60]. Increased interconnectedness and interdependence of people and countries are bringing additional change in a new form of economic diffusion and social practices [71]. The new form of globalization is shaping the MENA into a new competitive global marketplace [12][39][50]. Dubai has acquired OMX; the largest advanced-technology option market exchange in Europe, and entered into a relationship with NASDAQ. The country offers an organized infrastructure with an unobstructed employment market, resulting in remarkable trade and industry growth [8]. Flottau [26] reported that Abu Dhabi International Airport has seen growth of 21.5% with a capacity of 56 million passengers in 2012. Planners designed Dubai airport to act as an international hub and the forecast for 2020 stands at 98.5 million passengers annually. Dubai has attracted 5.5 million tourists in the first half of 2012, an increase of 11.1%, as claimed by United Arab Emirate’s tourism department [26]. Dubai’s government claimed that the expansion of Dubai Mall, the world largest mall, would attract new luxury retail businesses and other business entities to expand their operations to Dubai [58]. According to Dubai’s Land Department, the Emirates have seen a return on investment increase of $14.4 billion worth of real estate investments in the first half of 2013 [61]. In the Gulf region of MENA, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar airlines will be able to handle the rapidly increasing passenger flows by expanding the nations’ airports. Developers project expansion of Dubai-DXB in 2018 to grow from 60 million to approximately 90 million passengers per year. In Qatar, planners project completion of the new Doha International Airport (NDIA) expansion project by 2018. With an increased capacity of 50 million passengers a year, NDIA will cost an estimated $15.5 billion (New Doha International Airport, 2014). Investors in the education market have also shown strong interest in the MENA region, in which education has become an attractive business proposition. Economic analysts in Saudi Arabia expect education to be worth $96 billion in gross revenues by 2015. The Saudi Arabian government has increased its focus on education and healthcare and allocated 25% of its $219 billion budget for 2013 toward higher education and workforce training [5]. This paper discusses role of culture in globalization; specifically understanding religious differences, Islamic culture, and religious values that may influence business decisions in Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".