Dubai Makes Life Easy for Entrepreneurs

Tax-free and entrepreneur-friendly, the emirates are where ambition can flourish This is the city state that capitalism built. It’s a giant corporation, Dubai Inc. Everyone is welcome – no matter how troublesome their relatives – provided they do one thing: make money.

Dubai makes life easy for entrepreneurs. Setting up a company takes as little as two hours and foreigners can trade almost any goods or services in the dozens of duty-free micro-cities, each devoted to a business sector: Media City, Aviation City, Healthcare City and so on. Finance houses in the Dubai International Finance Centre trade in western and sharia-compliant shares and bonds.

Regulation is light-touch and there is no income tax, corporation tax or sales tax. Thanks to the fast-growing national airline, Emirates, the city is well connected to markets in Europe, Asia and Africa. Dubai’s location – two hours’ flight from the Asian subcontinent – means an endless supply of labourers to work in construction and the service sector.

Culturally, the living is easy. Dubai’s Muslim rulers have a remarkably tolerant attitude towards westerners. Christians can build their own churches and worship freely, alcohol is available to nonMuslims, women can dress how they wish and do any job, foreigners can own freehold property and while homosexuality is not tolerated, Brokeback Mountain is available in Video Ezy, the DVD rental shop. Politically, the city state is neutral, having avoided getting sucked into regional conflicts.

Small wonder that the foreigners are pouring in at a rate of 25,000 a month, stoking an economy that is already expanding at 11% a year, generating a $30 billion trade surplus. Under its Strategic Plan, Dubai plans to maintain double-digit growth and achieve a GDP of $108 billion by 2015.