What will happen in the Middle East if global economies slowdown?

However, with oil at $55 a barrel it is hard to get very excited about this development. What would it mean? Oil at $35 a barrel? That is still substantially up on the $20 per barrel planning assumptions of recent years.

For the arrival of a great bull market in oil - if that is what has happened after a 20 year bear market in the 1970s and 1980s - is not something that is going to fade away very quickly. Even if demand eases, the worry is still on the supply side.

Oil reserves are still impressive, as Federal Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week. What is far less impressive is the installed capacity to extract those reserves, and to refine crude oil into petroleum. Moreover, such capacity costs billions of dollars and takes many years to install.

Indeed, it will need oil prices to stay at quite a high level for some years in order to convince oil producers and oil majors that this investment is going to pay off.

The outlook for the Oil States is therefore something of a golden age, with black gold to finance just about any project that might be imagined. This, of course, is also a danger. Money can easily be wasted, for example, on job creation schemes with no meaningful economic purpose.

Oil wealth should be seen as a facilitator of economic reform, not an alternative to it. This is a once in a generation opportunity to lay down a modern economic infrastructure for the benefit of future nations.

The Dubai International Financial Centre is a good example; here world-class international regulatory standards are being adopted to create a new international financial community that will re-cycle the oil wealth of the region.

Physical investment in real estate is another phenomenon of the oil boom of the 21st century. Exciting new real estate projects - from Saudi Arabia to Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and of course Dubai - will still exist when oil prices eventually drop again.

These investments will also continue whatever the short-term ups and downs of the oil market, and thus constitute something of a built-in guarantee to economic growth, as nobody will pull the plug on these projects. It is more likely that further funds would be repatriated from overseas than that these prestige projects would be allowed to fail.

Indeed, the shear weight of money now committed to investment in the Middle East suggests that a lower oil price would not be enough to bring the present boom to a standstill, although it would probably bring the flow of new projects to a halt.

Thus whatever happens to the USA after the Presidential Election or the Chinese economy next year, the oil boom will continue in the Middle East, and the outlook for business remains at its most positive in a generation.