A Single Currency For The GCC: Launching A New Culture

The member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are moving towards launching a single currency by January 2010, an advanced step towards monetary union. These countries are characterized with a great degree of similarities whether political, economic, or social. This provides an advantage many regional economic groups lack. A single currency setting, as advocated in the literature, requires fulfillment of many conditions and requirements to assert its feasibility, desirability and durability. The SWOT methodology utilized in this paper presents a list of activities that must be thought of carefully before and after the year 2010, when the single currency is planned to circulate. Time is approaching fast, thus, GCC states should take serious steps in the remaining few years. The paper identifies very important issues that must be investigated and settled ahead of launching the common currency; among them the urgent need to establish super-national institutions and pooling legislations and economic environment

The competitiveness of Qatari tourism: A comparative and SWOT analysis

Purpose: Qatar has placed its tourism sector as one of the main strategies of economic diversification to achieve sustainable tourism goal. The country aims to develop diverse tourism products, ranging from cultural, urban, and nature tourism to education. The government has invested a huge amount in designing and building tourism infrastructures such as the eight new stadiums to host the 2022 World Cup, the national museum, Museum of Islamic Art, Katara Cultural Village, Souq Waqif, and many resorts and high end hotels. Given these significant tourism investments, it is unquestionable that the country reaps commensurate long-term benefits in terms of growth of its tourism sector and possible ripple effects in other sectors of the economy. Hence, this study reconnoitres the viability of positioning Qatar’s tourism sector as being pivotal to its economic-diversification strategy by comparing its tourism competitiveness with its strong competitors, namely the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Methodology: To examine this, the study employs secondary data, questionnaire surveys as well as SWOT analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Qatar relative to the competing destinations. Findings: The findings reveal that Qatar is not price competitive with the nearby countries. Furthermore, the competing nations, in general, have longer and deeper expertise in tourism, and invested more resources than Qatar in developing their tourism sectors. However, Qatar performed the best for its health and financial systems, compared to its competitors, based on scheme of the Global Competitiveness Rankings. In order to increase its tourism, the country should focus more on developing the highest quality of health tourism products and targeting on wealthy tourists who can afford to buy a property and live in Qatar as second-home residents. Originality/value: This paper investigates the tourism competitiveness of Qatar in comparison of its neighbouring destinations with respect to the goals set up by the Qatari government. Based upon the analysis, it can be concluded that Qatar has loss its price competitiveness to its neighbouring countries. Furthermore, the study provides a comprehensive examination of Qatar and its competitors using all indices provided by the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness reports, and conduct strengths and weaknesses analysis based on these indicators

Allergic Rhinitis and its Associated Co-Morbidities at Bugando Medical Centre in Northwestern Tanzania; A Prospective Review of 190 Cases.

Allergic rhinitis is one of the commonest atopic diseases which contribute to significant morbidity world wide while its epidemiology in Tanzania remains sparse. There was paucity of information regarding allergic rhinitis in our setting; therefore it was important to conduct this study to describe our experience on allergic rhinitis, associated co-morbidities and treatment outcome in patients attending Bugando Medical Centre. This was descriptive cross-sectional study involving all patients with a clinical diagnosis of allergic rhinitis at Bugando Medical Centre over a three-month period between June 2011 and August 2011. Data was collected using a pre-tested coded questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS statistical computer software version 17.0. A total of 190 patients were studied giving the prevalence of allergic rhinitis 14.7%. The median age of the patients was 8.5 years. The male to female ratio was 1:1. Adenoid hypertrophy, tonsillitis, hypertrophy of inferior turbinate, nasal polyps, otitis media and sinusitis were the most common co-morbidities affecting 92.6% of cases and were the major reason for attending hospital services. Sleep disturbance was common in children with adenoids hypertrophy (χ2 = 28.691, P = 0.000). Allergic conjunctivitis was found in 51.9%. The most common identified triggers were dust, strong perfume odors and cold weather (P < 0.05). Strong perfume odors affect female than males (χ2 = 4.583, P = 0.032). In this study family history of allergic rhinitis was not a significant risk factor (P =0.423). The majority of patients (68.8%) were treated surgically for allergic rhinitis co morbidities. Post operative complication and mortality rates were 2.9% and 1.6% respectively. The overall median duration of hospital stay of in-patients was 3 days (2 - 28 days). Most patients (98.4%) had satisfactory results at discharge. The study shows that allergic rhinitis is common in our settings representing 14.7% of all otorhinolaryngology and commonly affecting children and adolescent. Sufferers seek medical services due to co-morbidities of which combination of surgical and medical treatment was needed. High index of suspicions in diagnosing allergic rhinitis and early treatment is recommended

The Competitiveness of Qatari Tourism: A Comparative and SWOT Analysis

Purpose- Qatar has placed its tourism sector as one of the main strategies of economic diversification to achieve sustainable tourism goal. The country aims to develop diverse tourism products, ranging from cultural, urban, and nature tourism to education. The government has invested a huge amount in designing and building tourism infrastructures such as the eight new stadiums to host the 2022 World Cup, the national museum, Museum of Islamic Art, Katara Cultural Village, Souq Waqif, and many resorts and high end hotels. Given these significant tourism investments, it is unquestionable that the country reaps commensurate long-term benefits in terms of growth of its tourism sector and possible ripple effects in other sectors of the economy. Hence, this study reconnoitres the viability of positioning Qatar’s tourism sector as being pivotal to its economic-diversification strategy by comparing its tourism competitiveness with its strong competitors, namely the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Methodology- To examine this, the study employs secondary data, questionnaire surveys as well as SWOT analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Qatar relative to the competing destinations. Findings- The findings reveal that Qatar is not price competitive with the nearby countries. Furthermore, the competing nations, in general, have longer and deeper expertise in tourism, and invested more resources than Qatar in developing their tourism sectors. However, Qatar performed the best for its health and financial systems, compared to its competitors, based on scheme of the Global Competitiveness Rankings. In order to increase its tourism, the country should focus more on developing the highest quality of health tourism products and targeting on wealthy tourists who can afford to buy a property and live in Qatar as second-home residents. Originality/value- This paper investigates the tourism competitiveness of Qatar in comparison of its neighbouring destinations with respect to the goals set up by the Qatari government. Based upon the analysis, it can be concluded that Qatar has loss its price competitiveness to its neighbouring countries. Furthermore, the study provides a comprehensive examination of Qatar and its competitors using all indices provided by the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness reports, and conduct strengths and weaknesses analysis based on these indicators

Can Tourism Market Diversification Mitigate the Adverse Effects of a Blockade on Tourism? Evidence from Qatar

This study examines the effects of an unfavorable political event or environmental hostility, namely a blockade affecting international tourist inflows, and how tourism market diversification (TMD) could mitigate the adverse effects in the case of Qatar. To quantify these effects, we adopted a standard tourism demand model and augmented it with a Herfindahl index (HI) for the geographical diversification of tourism exports, a dummy variable for the blockade, and an interaction variable. We further analyzed the tourist inflows from various regions using regional dummies and their interaction terms to capture the different impacts of the blockade on Qatar’s inbound tourists from 46 source countries between 2006 and 2019. This study applied a panel-based differenced system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation to reveal several interesting findings. First, there was a significant positive individual effect of TMD on inbound tourism. Second, during the blockade, Qatar witnessed growing tourist inflows from Asia and Australasia, the Americas, and Europe. However, the incident inevitably placed severe constraints on some tourist flows to Qatar, primarily from Middle Eastern and African countries. Moreover, although the HI has a positive impact on tourism growth, our study revealed that the interaction terms between the HI and the blockade are only statistically significant in some cases, implying that a diversification strategy cannot completely mitigate the harmful effects of a blockade on tourism due to the severity of blockade effect. Nevertheless, a TMD strategy appears to be successful at the individual level

Population prevalence of asthma and its determinants based on European Community Respiratory Health Survey in the United Arab Emirates

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>No population study has explored the population distribution of adult asthma in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The objective is to estimate asthma prevalence in general population in UAE.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using standard European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS) questionnaires and tools, this is a cross-sectional assessment of a random sample of the population in established quotas of the seven Emirates in the UAE. We surveyed 1,220 participants, of which 63.2% were male, and 20.1% were UAE Nationals, with a mean (SD) age of 32.9 (14.1) years.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Prevalence of individual respiratory symptoms from the ECRHS screening questionnaire in all participants were generally ranging 8 - 10%, while participants 20-44 years presented lower prevalence in all symptoms (<it>p </it>< 0.05). The expected male:female ratio of reported wheezing and asthma attacks and its treatment by age was not observed. Participating women reported more individual symptoms than men. Overall, there were 15.4% (95% C.I. 13.5 - 17.5) participants who fulfilled our screening criteria for asthma, while for consistency with ECRHS, there were 12.1% (95% C.I. 10.4 - 14.1) participants who fulfilled the ECRHS asthma definition, being 9.8% (95% C.I. 7.8 - 12.2) of those 20-44 years, that is 8.6% of male and 11.8% of female young adults participating.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We conclude that asthma is common in the UAE, and gender differences are not observed in reported asthma symptoms in young adults. This being the first population based study exploring the prevalence of asthma and its determinants in the United Arab Emirates based on the ECRHS.</p

Global, regional, and national disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 333 diseases and injuries and healthy life expectancy (HALE) for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Measurement of changes in health across locations is useful to compare and contrast changing epidemiological patterns against health system performance and identify specific needs for resource allocation in research, policy development, and programme decision making. Using the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016, we drew from two widely used summary measures to monitor such changes in population health: disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) and healthy life expectancy (HALE). We used these measures to track trends and benchmark progress compared with expected trends on the basis of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI). METHODS: We used results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 for all-cause mortality, cause-specific mortality, and non-fatal disease burden to derive HALE and DALYs by sex for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016. We calculated DALYs by summing years of life lost and years of life lived with disability for each location, age group, sex, and year. We estimated HALE using age-specific death rates and years of life lived with disability per capita. We explored how DALYs and HALE differed from expected trends when compared with the SDI: the geometric mean of income per person, educational attainment in the population older than age 15 years, and total fertility rate. FINDINGS: The highest globally observed HALE at birth for both women and men was in Singapore, at 75·2 years (95% uncertainty interval 71·9-78·6) for females and 72·0 years (68·8-75·1) for males. The lowest for females was in the Central African Republic (45·6 years [42·0-49·5]) and for males was in Lesotho (41·5 years [39·0-44·0]). From 1990 to 2016, global HALE increased by an average of 6·24 years (5·97-6·48) for both sexes combined. Global HALE increased by 6·04 years (5·74-6·27) for males and 6·49 years (6·08-6·77) for females, whereas HALE at age 65 years increased by 1·78 years (1·61-1·93) for males and 1·96 years (1·69-2·13) for females. Total global DALYs remained largely unchanged from 1990 to 2016 (-2·3% [-5·9 to 0·9]), with decreases in communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional (CMNN) disease DALYs offset by increased DALYs due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The exemplars, calculated as the five lowest ratios of observed to expected age-standardised DALY rates in 2016, were Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Maldives, Peru, and Israel. The leading three causes of DALYs globally were ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and lower respiratory infections, comprising 16·1% of all DALYs. Total DALYs and age-standardised DALY rates due to most CMNN causes decreased from 1990 to 2016. Conversely, the total DALY burden rose for most NCDs; however, age-standardised DALY rates due to NCDs declined globally. INTERPRETATION: At a global level, DALYs and HALE continue to show improvements. At the same time, we observe that many populations are facing growing functional health loss. Rising SDI was associated with increases in cumulative years of life lived with disability and decreases in CMNN DALYs offset by increased NCD DALYs. Relative compression of morbidity highlights the importance of continued health interventions, which has changed in most locations in pace with the gross domestic product per person, education, and family planning. The analysis of DALYs and HALE and their relationship to SDI represents a robust framework with which to benchmark location-specific health performance. Country-specific drivers of disease burden, particularly for causes with higher-than-expected DALYs, should inform health policies, health system improvement initiatives, targeted prevention efforts, and development assistance for health, including financial and research investments for all countries, regardless of their level of sociodemographic development. The presence of countries that substantially outperform others suggests the need for increased scrutiny for proven examples of best practices, which can help to extend gains, whereas the presence of underperforming countries suggests the need for devotion of extra attention to health systems that need more robust support. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 328 diseases and injuries for 195 countries, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

As mortality rates decline, life expectancy increases, and populations age, non-fatal outcomes of diseases and injuries are becoming a larger component of the global burden of disease. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) provides a comprehensive assessment of prevalence, incidence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 328 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016