The effect of national culture on Commitment forms within international joint venture - Essay Example

the huge population growth which had occurred in the Arab world due to work opportunities related to oil supplies resulting in considerable international migration to countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Such immigration is mainly from surrounding countries (Ali, 1986). Such large-scale immigration occurs because there is a shortage of national labour means there is a need to seek non-national workers who then end up making national a minority within their own country (Ali, 1986).

Therefore this situation results in making the national culture a minority within its own environment and has significant implications for that culture. Ali provides data to prove this assertion. For example, the national population living in the United Arab Emirates has declined from 36 per cent in 1975 to 17 per cent in 1986 (Ali, 1986). In 1986 it was predicted that the proportion of nationals living in Saudi Arabia would fall to 9 per cent in 1990 and 2.5 per cent in 2000 (Ali, 1986). In comparison in 1983 the Indian population living in the United Arab Emirates numbered 300,000, which was one and a half times the number of nationals living in the country (Ali, 1986).

Ali went on to explore the reasons why countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates depended on non-national workforces. Some factors proposed by Ali (1986) included the relatively young age of the population of the Arab Gulf States’. For example in 1975 45 per cent of the populations of these states were under 15 (Hamady, 1978; cited by Ali, 1986). Also, there is a high illiteracy rate in the Arab Gulf States’. In 1978 the rate of illiteracy in this group raged from 31 per cent in the United Arab Emirates to 57 per cent of the population of Saudi Arabia (Al-Atiah, 1983; cited by Ali, 1986).

These high illiteracy rates are due to problems in the education system which does not have the capacity to provide adequate educational and technical skills (Ali, 1986). This is due to the