I came across this interesting piece of data. MEED, a business-focused magazine in the Middle East, tracks the Dollar amount of projects planned and under construction in the Gulf, Iraq, and Iran. It is a good way to track the development in the region, especially in these times of uncertainty. They publish the Dollar amount of planned and under-going projects for each country. What I did is normalized the number to make every country start in the same level, and used the rate of change of the Dollar amount for each country to change the index.
We can see from the graph that Iraq is the highest, i.e the most change in the Dollar amount since 2005, mainly due to the reconstruction of Iraq after the war. The UAE comes second. But what is interesting to see is that in April/May of 2009, developments in the UAE dropped substantially, since many companies cancelled their projects due to liquidity constraints. No other country saw that big of a drop. What made me curious is that Qatar is the most lagging country among the pool, which is hard to believe since we hear a lot about projects in Qatar, especially relating to the Oil and Gas industry.
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Loading ...Tags: bahrain, Development, Development in Gulf, dubai, GCC, Kuwait, MEED, MEED Project Index, oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE
Good job. It will be interesting to see the exponential growth in Kuwaiti spending in the next couple of years (if it ever happens).
[Reply]
naser -
i think its very important to understand MEED’s methodology for tracking projects as their tallies and reports are based on information they can get directly or through other media such as public announcement and the like.
different countries and their respective governments may have different approaches to this and many projects announcement don’t come with a cost – at least not in the announcement stage.
how would this effect your data?
also could you provide with a link to the MEED resource online if available?
thanks.
[Reply]
Naser Reply:
April 8th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Thank you for your comment.
I understand that some data might be missing, but you cannot disocunt or overlook the whole index just because some governments don’t disclose such information.
The link to the MEED website:
http://www.meed.com/meed-projects/gulf-projects-index/gulf-projects-full-archive/
[Reply]
peteyb Reply:
April 9th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
my point is that you can’t compare countries with each other fairly if they’re not following the same disclosure policy when it comes to projects. say kuwait has 2bn worth of projects for 2010 and qatar has 3bn yet qatar only announce 1bn of those and kuwait announces the entire 2bn then you’ve got an comparison that’s inaccurate.
bottom line: you can use the index to see the level of activity in each country and growth over time but not as a national comparative tool.
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