It is a universal sigh of traffic participants on congested streets: where do all those cars come from? Across the Gulf region, the answer increasingly is, from East Asia via Dubai. Whether it is a used Hyundai cruising the streets of Qatar’s capital Doha or an almost new Nissan in Benghazi, Baghdad, or Isfahan, chances are that the vehicle was shipped through Dubai. In the UAE’s economic boom of late, passenger cars have been swept into the country in a rising stream with compound annual growth rates of 30% from 2001 to 2005, documented by the thickening traffic in the country’s major population centers that led most recently to the introduction of road tolls on Dubai’s main artery. But the even more interesting story from regional perspective is that Dubai has become a trade hub for cars, with annual growth rates of vehicle re-exports exceeding growth of car imports. A
