The countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are not known for their humanitarianism. They are authoritarian Islamic states that sit on huge pools of oil, and theyre also among the most unequal in the world. About 85 percent of the population of the UAE, for example, consists of migrant workers living on roughly $5,000 per year. Fifteen percent of the population are Emirati nationals, who live on roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year, implying greater economic inequality than existed even in Apartheid South Africa or the antebellum South. But these foreign migrant workers earn vastly more in the GCC nations than they would at home in Bangladesh or India, where they would make around $1,000 per year. By welcoming migrant workers, the UAE and its neighbor Qatar do more than any other rich country to reduce global inequality. Through migration, Qatar’s per-person contribution to the reduction in global inequality is almost three times that which would be achieved by eliminating all inequality in the United States, and many times that created by taxes and transfers in any of the rich countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), according to calculations by one of us. If you take into account remittances—in UAE, for example, migrant workers send home more than 75 percent of their salary—the reduction in inequality is even greater. newrepublic/article/120179/how-reduce-global-income-inequality-open-immigration-policies
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 22:45:06 +0000