Tag Archives: Urban Economics
Dubai – advertising the property market
You know a country has too much money when they build a hundred acre park covered with lush green grass in the middle of a desert or for that matter, even a skiing slope. Dubai is no stranger to ostentatious spending but compared to its equally rich cousins in the Middle East, the rulers of Dubai tend to ‘invest’ their oil revenues in their infrastructure and building an alternative to an after-oil future rather than building colossal palaces (just because you can!) I was in Dubai seven years ago and my brother and I chose to visit this thriving economy rather than idle our time on Mall Road in some Indian hillstation. Of course, we missed out on sylvan-lined bucolic evening walks but instead were exposed to wealth as never seen before. Since then, we have heard that there are plenty more things that Dubai has to offer including your own private island shaped like a country within a set of islands set to the world map.
We’ve all heard of the construction boom that is going on in Dubai so I thought it wise to revisit the Dubai property market through a paid review of LatticeWerks. You have seen the glamorous symbols of Dubai like the arching sail-like Burj-Al Arab Luxury Hotel and the view of the Giant Palm Islands but did you know that a majority of the construction cranes in the world are found in Dubai? That in itself should tell you that it is not over yet and the future of Dubai skyline is just beginning to form.
LatticeWerks, a property investment firm in Dubai gives us an overview of why you should invest in Dubai. I just hope they would increase the font a little and emphasize the headlines more since it makes it extremely difficult to read and you don’t want to lose out on potential investors if they can’t read your website, right? And of course, everyone loves photos of fancy buildings and cityscape. Perspectives of upcoming projects and a view of the future doesn’t hurt either. Convincing investors in overseas property can be much more tricky than showing them palm trees lined oceanfront property in say, Florida.
That brings me to another point -are customers convinced of investment opportunities by simply browsing through the websites of investment companies? Probably in hot property markets like Dubai, nothing can go wrong (or will it?) but are customers still gullible to read a rosy picture description of a faraway land and willingly hand over their hard earned money or will they demand more information even if it is on the Web? Probably I’m looking at it the wrong way. Probably such websites merely open the Pandora’s box and hook in the consumer making him initiate an enquiry following which the sales experts take over.
What do you think?
Resolving Poverty
Attempts to resolve poverty and to grant economic justice has been the aim of planning ever since Charles Booth’s studies in London have shown it as a bane to the urbanscape. Planners have oscillated between objectives of eliminating poverty from the neighborhood and eliminating poverty from the people; both of which claim to achieve common ends through very different means. The former merely shifts the problem elsewhere and the latter puts the concerns of the people often in lieu of the economic process.
However one common strand has been to throw money at solving poverty, the logic being isn’t poverty defined as the lack of monetary resources so more of money would be good, right? On the contrary such methods have not only failed to make a dent in the larger issue of poverty but have often compounded the problem. Neoclassical economists will believe in letting the people choose what they want by giving them financial means to do so and if they fail to alleviate their problem, central planners will say, see we told you they cannot make the best decisions for themselves but we have to make it for them. Thus goes the struggle in trying to resolve poverty and only more money gets thrown at a problem that isn’t even close to being solved. The poverty issue has once again found its place in the limelight thanks to John Edward’s Two Americas presidential campaign.
However contrary to the popular opinion, poverty is more of a sociological problem than an economic or political one. But approaches to solve it from a social perspective by first trying to understand its underlying causes have often found lacking. I don’t propose to offer a silver bullet solution for poverty alleviation in this article (if I had one, wouldn’t I be running for President?) but rather shed some light on recent attempts especially at MIT and other top universities in trying to understand the problem and work toward finding a solution.
World's Priciest Cities
Oslo and London head the list. But surprisingly, my hometown Mumbai is among the cheapest place to live in. To think that everyone out there complains how expensive it is. Delhi, yet another Indian metro was also among the bottom five cities.
Update: Fast forward to 2007, “Moscow is the world’s most expensive city for the second year in a row, thanks to an appreciating ruble and rising housing costs, a new survey reports” [source]. London is now placed at #2 and Tokyo is at #4. To give you an example of Moscow’s cost of living:
“In Moscow, a luxury two-bedroom apartment will cost an expat $4,000 a month; a CD rings up at $24.83; one copy of an international daily newspaper is $6.30; and a fast-food hamburger meal totals $4.80.”
This ranking is based on a survey conducted by Mercer Human Resource Consulting that ranks 143 cities around the world, measuring the comparative cost of more than 200 areas such as housing, transportation and food.