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We provide an overview of the state of the higher education system in the UAE, and investigate its capacity to supply Dubai’s economy with skilled labor and achieve the emirate’s strategic social development objectives. We examine various characteristics of the higher education sector and discuss their inherent strengths and weaknesses in light of Dubai’s labor market needs. Our findings reveal that the UAE higher education sector has witnessed an impressive growth since 1997 mostly led by a vigorous expansion of the private higher education sector. This situation led to a substantial growth in higher education opportunities for the UAE population. However, the lack of development of graduate studies and the lower quality of graduates, as perceived by both employees and employers, represent the main challenges to the capacity of the sector in fulfilling the needs of Dubai’s economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relevant economic aspects that could affect the sustainability of the HE sector in the UAE.

Data are collected mainly through secondary sources and based on the relevant information. Two constructs, namely, market factors and educational governance are identified from the literature. An empirical model depicting the different factors that contribute to these two variables is outlined.

Educational governance and market factors are identified as the key pillars which contribute to the economic efficiency in the HE sector in the UAE. These constructs are affected by relevant factors. Some of the issues relating to educational governance could be controlled. Though factors contributing to market conditions could be deemed uncontrollable, HE institutions could come up with better strategies to deal with those issues.

The UAE HE sector could be a major contributor to the economy in the future, it is important to identify the main constructs and the associated forces which could impact the economic efficiency of the HE sector. The model proposed could be empirically tested in future studies.

This study is a novel attempt to examine sustainability in the HE sector in terms of economic efficiency, while previous studies have focused on the social and environmental aspect of the sustainability in the HE sector. Thus this study tries to address this lacuna in this domain by focusing on the economic efficiency aspect which is an important contributor to the sustainable development. The results may provide valuable insights for universities and regulators in developing appropriate strategies to improve the HE sector.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of internationalization of higher education (HE) in the United Arab Emirates by examining the development of its HE system, and analyzing the components and results of internationalization.

The study adopts a qualitative research methodology to analyze primary evidence from interviews with academics in the UAE, and uses documents and archival research as secondary evidence to provide a comprehensive view of the UAE’s internationalized HE sector. A review of the literature is undertaken to inform discussion and analysis which focuses on the internal and external environments of the UAE. A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis identifies the benefits and challenges for the UAE of internationalized HE.

The study finds that internationalization of HE in the UAE has grown rapidly in the last decade, and that the UAE has sought to establish and promote itself as an “education hub” in the Middle East. However, this may subsume the government’s parallel goal of educating its citizenry to the level of skills necessitated by globalization. Three major forces promoting internationalization in the UAE are neoliberalism, quality assurance, and imported internationalization, an approach seeks the prestige conferred by international accreditation that is predominant in the UAE as well as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states. An area of concern is the governance of systems to ensure high quality for universities that may be state-owned, privately owned, or international branch campuses. The study concludes that regional integration could provide the way forward for these countries in their internationalization efforts, not by standardizing but by better formulating study programs across the range of state, private and international higher education institutions.

The study has important implications for HE policy and governance in the development of internationalized HE in the UAE. It provides theoretical perspectives with practical implications, focusing on some of the critical issues in this developing field for HE administrators and practitioners alike. It also has implications for the UAE’s national social values and cultural identity. This may be a reflection of the UAE’s relatively recent unification as a state whose HE system, developed to skill its population, has been overtaken by the imperative to compete in a globalized world. The research is limited by the absence of longitudinal data to review longer-term outcomes.

The UAE, like other GCC countries, is striving to take its higher educational system to a higher level of performance. This study can be considered as one of the very few studies in the area of the internationalization of HE in the UAE. It contributes to the HE literature by identifying factors and circumstances that facilitate, and hinder, the development of internationalization of HE in the UAE. Globalization can be considered as one of the history’s most significant social processes, and the HE sector plays a vital role in the delivery of knowledge and skills to societies, and thus its socio-economic development.

The labor force participation rates of females have been increasing steadily over the past few decades in the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and are expected to continue to increase due to increasing levels of education and social change. While, there is a substantive amount of literature on the issues of gender gap in wages and employment conditions in Western developed economies, the evidence from developing economies – especially in the Middle East – remains very scant. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to bridging this gap by examining gender-based differences in employment conditions for local and expatriate workers in the context of the GCC region.

The authors utilize a data set from the 2007 cross-section Dubai Labor Market Survey which covers a stratified random sample of employees in the UAE labor market. In addition to descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations of the data by workers’ gender, nationality, and various characteristics of their employment conditions, two empirical models intended to investigate factors that influence access to employment and wage determination of male and female workers in the UAE labor market were estimated.

The findings of the study reveal that there are gender-based differences and inequity in employment in the UAE labor market. The authors highlight specific impacts of contextual factors on the employment conditions of women compared to men. The gender gap in the UAE context is compounded by nationality effects; whereby gender-based differences become less apparent in the case of foreign workers compared to UAE nationals.

This paper is one of very few studies that addressed the gender gap in employment conditions in the Arab Middle Eastern or GCC context. The paper uses quantitative data from a large random sample of workers in the UAE.

The aim of this study is to assess the managerial practices in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) higher education sector through the lens of “new managerialism”.

An extensive review of new managerialism literature in higher education was conducted to develop a structured survey questionnaire. Using 176 useable responses obtained from the country-wide survey of academic staff, the underlying factor structure of new managerialism was first established using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and then ANOVA was carried out to check whether there existed any difference in the six factors as well as for the individual items within each factor across the three types of Universities in the UAE, namely public universities, private-local owned universities and private-foreign owned universities.

The study unearthed a six-factor framework (monitoring and evaluation, transparency, bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement, research productivity and academic freedom and flexibility) of new managerialism comprising of 20 managerial practices. Of the six factors, significant difference was found for bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement and academic freedom and flexibility across different types of universities.

In terms of novelty, the study is the first attempt to explore new managerialism in higher education in the Middle Eastern context.

The purpose of this study is to look at the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE's) progress toward economic diversification and becoming a knowledge-based economy.

The World Development Indicators (WDI) and GlobalEconomy websites provided all secondary data for this paper. The data are largely used to highlight the UAE's current level of diversification and, consequently, the atmosphere for a knowledge economy transition necessary for sustainable development. Additionally, the study conducts a nonparametric estimation using DEA to identify the condition of four variables pertaining to the UAE's knowledge economy. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) was utilized empirically in this study to determine the current state of diversity.

According to this research, the UAE economy was reasonably diverse until recently. The number of patents and journal papers published per resident both add to the UAE's GDP. Furthermore, the UAE's information and communication technology (ICT) exports are inconsistent; a declining trend in the number of researchers and the education sector's continuous struggles are major concerns. Furthermore, Figure 1 in the introduction reinforces this conclusion by noting that construction and building remained the greatest employer of labor throughout the time period. This is a significant finding because, as illustrated in this research, low labor force participation in the education sector, combined with lower citizen participation in advanced education in the UAE, results in low scientific research and publications, with low knowledge output as patent applications. In general, the majority of the UAE's population is expat, and the extent to which locals and expats contribute to the overall advancement of education remains an open question. According to the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, three variables in the knowledge economy are productive, and they are economic incentive and institutional regime, innovation systems and ICT. The findings of this article will aid policymakers in the UAE, and more generally in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, in developing more successful policies that help in the growth of a knowledge- and innovation-based economy.

This study is appropriate for UAE economic policymakers to monitor the state and policies required for the UAE's transition to a knowledge economy.

This issue has rarely been addressed by the use of robust parametric and nonparametric processes, as well as robust data visualization tools.

The development of teaching public relations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is an important topic to uncover because it is related to and to some extent parallel with the development of the UAE and its vital sectors. The purpose of the study is determine the circumstances of the emergence of teaching public relations in the UAE, to investigate public relations education offered in the UAE universities, to discuss the development of public relations education including challenges and opportunities.

The authors conducted 12 semistructured interviews with public relations educators in the UAE universities to understand the importance, development and current status of public relations and education.

The finding indicates a lot of developments took place in the establishment of public relations programs and its professionalization within a short time span, but more empirical research is needed to address the issues that have been brought up in the study.

The current research looked at the undergraduate public relations programs, but the status of graduate programs in communication and public relations needs to be investigated. More research in academic field is needed to discuss how the development of the public relations education influenced the public relations practice in UAE.

There is not much research done specifically on the public relations education in the UAE. The study sheds light on understanding the perspective of public relations educators on public relations programs and provides insights on how public relations education can be integrated to the local context without losing the global perspective.

This paper aims at exploring the role of science, technology and innovation (STI) in transforming the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into a knowledge economy (KE) by initially assessing the country's achievements implementing the KE pillars. It further evaluates the country's STI capacity and competence in exercising adoption and diffusion of knowledge.

A situational analysis and a comparative approach were exploited to describe the UAE's position in terms of transition to a KE, highlighting weaknesses, strengths and opportunities. Related discussions were supported by data made available from several international sources. The country's worldwide performance was particularly matched against that of the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) together with two more Asian transformation economies and also a few examples from other Arab and Muslim countries.

Apparently, the UAE has made important progress in the implementation of the KE pillars and transitioning to the innovation‐driven stage, particularly at the macro‐economic environment and quality of infrastructure levels, notably the ICT sector. However, the county is facing several challenges that require concerted efforts and rigorous follow‐up. For instance, the UAE is lagging behind most transformation economies and some GCC countries when it comes to investment in education and R&D activities. This hurdle impeded the country's ability to absorb, adapt and create new technology and knowledge. As a result, the country's economy is experiencing a negative trade balance in foreign technology transfer. The comparative and situational analysis methodology adopted in the context concluded several lessons and policy remarks.

Using the most updated data, this exercise stems from the country's need to examine the current status, a necessary step for realization of new prospects and adoption and application of future policies and programs.

An inherent challenge within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) higher education sector is the absence of both comprehensive system of data collection and consistency in the use of indictors among a variety of collection projects. At the root of this distributed system is a federal arrangement with two levels of government potentially involved in licensing and supervision combined with a series of academic “free zones” that can have unique or limited regulatory controls. As a result, there is a very limited systematic collection of institutional data in the country’s dynamic higher education sector, which hampers the alignment of planning activities and reduces the ability of institutions to benchmark performance with peers. To address this issue, an ambitious attempt to consolidate higher education data collection in the UAE is being developed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research through the creation of Centre for Higher Education Data and Statistics (CHEDS). Combining the best international practices and an inclusive stakeholder-focused approach, CHEDS designed a system to collect raw data from institutions and then convert this data into a set of indicators with the potential for distribution to the public. The critical element for developing a truly comprehensive system is the degree to which international branch campuses of foreign institutions voluntarily participate, for these institutions tend to be located in the free zones and are therefore outside the jurisdiction of the central government ministry overseeing the CHEDS. If successful in recruiting these institutions, CHEDS has the potential to create a truly cooperative system of data collection that should be regionally replicated or even expanded to encompass other countries within the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the differential impacts of job satisfaction (JS), trust (T), and perceived organizational performance (POP) on turnover intention (TI) in public and private sector organizations.

Draws on a sample of 311 employees from the service sector (129 public and 182 private) in the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE). The main concepts utilized in the study are borrowed from previous research and further tested for validity and reliability. Four main hypotheses are explored.

In support of previous research, statistical analysis (t-test) revealed that public sector employees tend to be more satisfied, more trusting, and have less intention to leave their organization. Regression analysis revealed that public sector employees’ TI are most significantly affected by their perceptions of the performance of their organization, with JS, work experience (WE) and education (Ed) also having significant effects. In contrast, private sector employees’ TI was most significantly affected by JS and feelings of trust (T).

Although very useful, the present study is limited in scope and therefore suffers from some limitations. The sample only includes employees from UAE organizations operating in education, some government institutions and the financial sector. Future research might consider including employees the health sector and other public organizations such as the immigration/police departments which play important strategic roles in the UAE economy. Also, future research might consider extending the scope of the study to include institutions in similar neighboring countries in the region, such as Qatar and Kuwait.

The findings of this study points to the relative importance of trust, JS and perceived organizational performance in affecting TI in public and private sectors. These can be considered as indicators to assist managers in these sectors to better manage/minimize TIs. In particular, the findings indicate that managers in general (and UAE public sector managers in particular) need to monitor and better manage not only their employees’ JS but also perceptions of the overall performance of the organization.

While research on the influence of JS on TI in both of these sectors has been abundant over the years, studies examining the impact of trust and perceptions of organizational performance remain few and are largely lacking. Also, studies on turnover in the UAE (and particularly those comparing public and private sectors) remain largely lacking. This study and its findings fill this gap and provide some insights on the differential impact of trust, JS and perceived organizational performance on employee TIs in public-private sectors, particularly in the UAE context.