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Notes -
(not OP but)
In a nutshell, yes, this is my understanding.
An initially-poor but erudite population—or more precisely, one with bourgeois values and at least enough erudition to succeed in the world of commerce—without any particular ties to the land can pick up stakes and succeed as a “market-dominant minority” somewhere less shithole-y so long as that place has a semblance of property rights and rule of law (cf. assimilated Ashkenazim in Europe before the Holocaust and in the northeastern US for most of the 20th century; Lebanese in Mexico; Indians in East Africa; Chinese in Southeast Asia)
But these peoples are middlemen, arbitrageurs, rootless symbol-manipulators par excellence. I say this as someone whose own parents immigrated to the West from South Asia in pursuit of precisely this sort of opportunity. That’s not to say these peoples provide no economic value—they obviously do, else they wouldn’t get rich under mercantile capitalism—but you don’t see advanced manufacturing or even agriculture above subsistence level coming from a people who lack a deep, abiding attachment to the very soil where their fathers died, or the soil for which they shed blood in the hopes of securing its bounty to their kinfolk and their descendants, forever and ever.
How would you then compare the UAE to, say, Singapore?
I am no expert on Singapore in particular, but the vibe I get is that most of Singapore’s success comes from its position as Southeast Asia’s financial hub, which itself is partly a gift of geography (much like the UAE’s oil, really) and partly due to the aforementioned property rights, rule of law, and Sinosphere-descended culture of hard work and education.
I am not aware that Singapore is at all a hotspot of advanced indigenous industry/manufacturing. A decent number of multinationals have a Singapore office, typically for Asia-Pacific sales or finance—as I said, Singapore is the financial hub of Southeast Asia—but I’m only aware of a couple with any engineering or product development presence in Singapore. Both are FAANGs/software shops (software being a perfect fit for symbol-manipulator types, naturally) which are (in)famous for using the Singapore office as a staging area for Indian and Chinese engineers while finessing the American immigration system for H-1B visas.
Nor do I know of any homegrown Singaporean companies that have become globe-striding household names, a la Samsung, Sony, or TSMC (the latter, I suppose, being a household name only in the nerdiest of houses)
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
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I think expecting a city-state to have the same sort of industrial manufacturing capacity as nations 4 to 20 times its size is a bit unfair. It's precisely for this reason that Singapore, and Hong Kong before it, intentionally specialized in finance and not in building cars or integrated circuits. The UAE is in a similar position and has chosen the same path. Perhaps being a bank is in some moral sense inferior to being a factory, but if the choices are between that and remaining poor I know what I'd pick.
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Singapore has a pretty large chemical refinery business, although the plants are operated by multinationals.
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