UAE announces 50 projects to boost economy, businesses await details

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The United Arab Emirates has launched a series of programs to stimulate and diversify its economy, seeking to attract some $150 billion in new foreign investment in the coming decade.

Fifty new projects and initiatives will be announced in the coming weeks, Emirati officials said, to coincide with the country’s 50th anniversary, including new visas to attract residents and skilled workers.

“The UAE’s drive for the next 50 years is to become a global player across different industries,” Sarah Al Amiri, the UAE’s first Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Sunday. “The region is what we’ve been targeting for the past five decades; now we’re moving on to ensure that a lot of our sectors are competitive on a global level.” 

The country aims to invest more heavily in advanced industry sectors and technology education. Newly introduced changes include visa schemes like the Green Visa, which is meant to expand self-residency status for skilled individuals and investors, and the Freelancers Visa, which will enable the self-employed to sponsor themselves. The country has already introduced the 10-year Golden Visa, granted selectively to the highly skilled and select residents and investors. 

Visas are a core pillar of the UAE economy as nearly 90% of its population of 10 million are expatriates. Traditionally, without a job, an expat resident loses their visa; this was a reason behind nearly 10% of the country’s population leaving over the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.  

The oil-rich desert sheikhdom has been working to bring in new capital and residents to help its economy rebound from the blows dealt to it by the pandemic, which led its economy to shrink 6.1% in 2020. Late last year it launched the remote worker visa, which allows individuals to live in the UAE for one year even if their employment is overseas, as long as they meet a certain earnings threshold.

Like many major announcements in the UAE, however, the news of the 50 initiatives was light on details, with no specifics yet as to when each of these programs will begin and exactly what they will entail.