ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to assess the impact of the recession on key industries in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which employs a majority of migrant workers from South Asia, and to examine the migrant's strategies to cope with the crisis. The national identities of the expatriate population in the UAE are not statistically verified. Workforce participation rate (WPR) is the ratio of working or employed to the total population in the UAE was 72.6 per cent in 2008. The large investments in construction, real estate and manufacturing were attracting 200,000 workers a year to the UAE during 2000-2008. About 75 per cent of the UAE labour force was from Asia and Indian workers constituted 42.5 per cent of the population. The macroeconomic indicators show that the savings rate in the UAE is high, between 31 and 41 per cent of the GDP since 2001. Nearly 48 percent of the international trade volume of the UAE was with non-Arab Asian economies.
