Mohammad orders housing project for national youth - Gulfnews

Quote:

Dubai - The Dubai Executive Council yesterday announced a Dh10 billion housing project for young UAE nationals. The order, in line with the directives of His Highness Shaikh Maktoum Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, was issued by General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Crown Prince and UAE Defence Minister.

Tariq Yousef was on campus yesterday and delivered a lecture on economic reform. The central question was why economic reform has been slow and incomplete in the Middle East. His conclusion was that real progress on economic reform will only come jointly with political reform. This is not because elites block reform (though that, too, happens), but because the existing social contract -- his terminology -- would be changed, and it can be viably changed only with simultaneous economic and political reform (at least this is what I took from the lecture).

Part of the UAE social contract could be the public provision of housing. (And the list goes on.) Why is it, I wonder, that the state provides housing rather than giving housing vouchers, or cash grants, or a share in the ownership of the oil riches of the country a la Alaska Permanent Fund?