Visa fees for maids, drivers may double :: Khaleej Times

If you've never lived in the UAE, here some of the key facts to know in order to begin to imagine life here.

1. 80% of the population are not citizens and never will be.

2. 90% of the working population are noncitizens.

3. And, as the Khaleej Times reports today, an "official said domestic servants and others falling in this job category constituted 8.2 per cent of the labour force in the country."

Oman petrol stations shut taps for Al Ain taxis :: GN

OmanOil has tired of the cross border arbitrage brought about by the substantial difference in petrol prices in the UAE and Oman. Pegging its price below the UAE price was draining its coffers. UAE taxis will no longer be allowed to buy in Oman.

Ironically, the lucrative illegal export of incredibly cheap petrol from Iran into the northern Omani province of Musandam continues.

Was 30% price hike justified? :: KT

The Khaleej Times points out that neighboring countries have not increased the price of petrol to consumers despite the run up in the price of crude, and their retail prices have been unchanged for years in many cases:

Across the border, Bahrain, with far less reserves, has not [raised the retail price] and, in Saudi Arabia, the retail price of gasoline has remained at 99 Halala per litre for nearly 10 years.

Oman, on the other hand, did hike diesel prices by as much as 40 per cent earlier this year, but the move was not linked to rising prices in the world market. In fact, petrol prices in Oman have virtually remained unchanged for years and the government had been forced to increase the diesel price in May only to check what it said was a large scale smuggling of the fuel to neighbouring countries where the rates were considerably higher.

One major difference between these countries and the UAE is that the nationals here are only 20% of the population. Thus, in the UAE, low petrol prices are an especially costly way of transferring benefits from the government to the citizens. In the last several months we have seen the government instead expand social assistance programs targeted strictly to citizens, programs like unemployment compensation and housing subsidies.

The KT article continues:

If the economic viability of a few distribution companies were the only motive, there could have been other options for a petroleum-surplus country like the UAE to spare it's economy of the huge inflationary burden it is facing today. In scenario one, as all the distribution companies in the country are government owned, there could have been a government sponsored consolidation of distribution that could have given the one and only distributor access to country's crude at production cost. In the second — and a more business-like solution – the government had the option of supplying all petroleum companies refined petroleum products at a fixed price allowing a reasonable margin.

As I noted yesterday, while the distribution companies may be government owned, their ownership varies. The national oil company Adnoc is owned by Abu Dhabi, and Adnoc is a vertically integrated company in (profitable) crude oil production and export, refining capacity, and local distribution. The Dubai-owned oil company ENOC is simply a retailer and it buys refined products at world prices. If ENOC were given access to "refined petroleum products at a fixed price allowing a reasonable margin" then Abu Dhabi would be subsidizing Dubai. Thus, I don't see "scenario two" as a politically viable option. The same goes for nationalization of distribution in "scenario one" as that would make the Dubai-based owners of ENOC quite unhappy.

In short, the UAE's greater willingness to increase retail prices for petroleum products is driven by two factors that make the UAE distinct in the region:

• citizens are a small percentage of the population
• federalism and the competing interests of the different emirates

Arabs fear spread of federalism :: Middle East Online

Quoting:

As Kurds and Shiites in Iraq push for a federal constitution, fears are rising in the Arab world that the urge to create separate states could spread in countries with religious and ethnic minorities, analysts said.

When minority groups feel oppressed or deem that their rights are restricted by the centralised states in which they live, they are drawn to notions of autonomy or federalism so that they can better exercise their rights, Arab experts said.

Therefore, the Arab world is keeping a close eye on the outcome of demands for a federalist Iraq as it creates its first constitution since the fall of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein, said Nabil Abdel-Fattah, an analyst from Cairo's Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

"The result of the fight - between Sunnis who are against federalism in Iraq and Kurds who are for it - will have a decisive influence on how other countries' crises play out, from west of Asia to the Middle East and Iran," he said.

"Federalism was not one of the concepts in the Arab political dictionary, until now," he said.

The United Arab Emirates is presently the only federal state in the gulf region.

Some parallels between the sources of success of the federal system in the UAE and the USA can be made. For example,

• The USA was formed by the voluntary association of the 13 colonial states; the UAE was formed by the voluntary association of 7 independent emirates.
• In both countries the individual states/emirates saw there was a political and economic gain to unifying and ceding control to a central government for joint protection from foreign intervention, and to reign in destructive barriers to trade between states/emirates.
• The USA had George Washington; the UAE had Sheik Zayed. Both founding leaders were highly respected by large majorities of their citizens.
• The USA and the UAE both experienced huge immigration -- the difference here being that in the UAE few of these immigrants have gained citizenship.
• In the USA and the UAE the ethnic and sectarian diversity within each state/emirate was not dissimilar to the diversity between the states/emirates.
• In the USA and the UAE states/emirates were delegated considerable discretion to handle local affairs locally.
• The US left some questions of major conflict unresolved. Less than 100 years after its founding, a very bloody civil war was fought over those issues. When that war ended the central government gained considerable power, including a greatly expanded ability to tax -- and thereby redistribute. In the UAE 90% of the oil wealth is in Abu Dhabi and it has been used for the same redistributive purposes as well as a carrot and stick to defuse conflict between emirates.

Power blackout in Dubai:: Gulf News

Thursday's power blackout in Dubai affected one million people; power began to be restored after four hours. Service to all customers was restored within eight hours.

Temperatures on the day were 41C (104F).

The equipment failure has been traced to a fault in a transmission substation. To protect a fault in one location from damaging equipment in other parts of an interconnected system, power systems are designed to shutdown surrounding equipment. In some conditions - such as when customer usage at the time is high - this can result in major blackouts. It takes time to bring the system back up, and it is done in stages. Thursday's outage in Dubai followed this classic pattern. Shutdowns are of course preferred to damaged equipment - both result in blackouts and the latter means a longer blackout.

Dubai's power system relies on natural gas turbines for power generation. Gas turbine generators are small in comparison to coal-fired generators or nuclear generators. Also, in comparison to coal or nuclear, they can be turned on and off easily. These are features that happen to simplify the problem of bringing a power system back up following an extensive outage in the system such as occurred in Dubai yesterday.

Power systems are interconnected by a transmission grid. The purpose of interconnection is to lower cost of generation and to enhance reliability. Imagine a system where each neighborhood had its own generator and neighborhoods were not interconnected. First, it would not take advantage of the likely possibility that one larger generator shared by two neighborhoods would have cost advantages. Second, if a generator fails in one neighborhood, your fellow neighborhoods cannot lend a hand by generating more power and transmitting it to you.

Under most conditions, interconnection is your friend. But under some conditions - like those that occurred in Dubai on Thursday - a failure in one part of the system is transmitted to the rest of the system.

When technicians study a major power outage they identify the state of the system at the time of the outage. How heavy was demand? Was it particularly heavy in one area? Were some parts of the system - transmission or generation - offline at the time of the fault? Answers to these questions lead to recommendations for physical changes in the system and for changes in operating procedures.

Sharjah City, which shares a long border with Dubai City, was not affected by the blackout. This suggests that the Sharjah and Dubai systems are not interconnected, or if they are the interconnection is limited. What if they had been interconnected; what would have happened? There are two basic possibilities. One is that the blackout would have spilled over into Sharjah's system. The other is that the Sharjah system could have helped Dubai's system and limited the extent of the blackout. We observed here that Sharjah's system has been operating at or near capacity for several months; under these conditions Sharjah had no power to share and interconnection likely would have led to a wider blackout, not a smaller one.

I suspect there are political reasons why the Sharjah and Dubai systems are isolated from each other.

Unemployment of nationals could exceed 40,000 :: Gulf News

Al Faris said while 11,000 nationals, mostly women, applied to Tanmia to find work last year, according to estimates real unemployment figures hovered aro-und 37,000 to 40,000. He said the guestimate was a result of piece-meal studies done on unemployment in different emirates.

The lower Tanmia figure he said, was because "not all job seekers apply to Tanmia for assistance, and not everybody who applies at Tanmia is unemployed".

Comment: Thus, the upper figure counts some who don't apply to Tanmia but who are seeking work and are unemployed, while the lower figure excludes both these job seekers as well as job seekers who are registered with Tanmia but are not unemployed.

Is education to blame?

Al Faris said the nation's public education system had to shoulder some of the blame. Tanmia statistics showed 44 per cent of job seekers had finished secondary studies, and another 22 per cent had a BA.

Another set of figures showed an exodus into private education. "Fifty-two per cent of students now complete their studies entirely in the private system. Is there a crisis in education? Yes, experts in that field say there is a problem," Al Faris said.

Paraphrasing: The large percentage of nationals in private primary and secondary school is an indication that national parents are taking their children out of government schools because they provide a poor quality of education.

Comment: I'm somewhat incredulous that 52% of nationals are in private schools. There's another number to ask about.

Mismatch between training and available jobs?

Al Faris said UAE nationals were not taking on studies that could lead to more job opportunities. "Most of the higher education [of Tanmia applicants] was in computing and business, which shows these professions don't necessarily guarantee a job anymore."

Female unemployment and social constraints

Social constraints were also stopping more women from entering the labour market, Al Faris said. "We've noticed the further a woman is from a city, the more likely she is to be employed." Still-powerful cultural mores prevented women from moving outside her family home before marriage to find work, he said.

Educational attainment choices as barrier to a good job

Al Faris said the nation's public education system had to shoulder some of the blame. Tanmia statistics showed 44 per cent of job seekers had finished secondary studies, and another 22 per cent had a BA.

Comment: But how much blame should the system shoulder for choices made by students not to complete their secondary studies or not to pursue a college degree? The public education system also has to contend - for instance - with the fact that the police and military will take on male nationals who have not completed high school.

Note, also, that of the students who do complete high school most are women. The same is true of those who earn a college degree. But, as noted, females face social constraints about the kinds of jobs they accept and whether they work at all. Thus, of those most likely to work (males) educational attainment is even lower than the figures cited above.

According to the Tanmia study Employment and Human Resource Report 2004, the number of nationals in their final year of secondary education in 2002 was 14898. Over 58% of those were females. In 2001/2002 there was a total of 7117 national graduates earning a college degree in the UAE. 73% of those were female. (It is true, that males are more likely than females to study abroad - the size of this effect is unknown.)

The magnificent Omanis :: Secret Dubai

Secret Dubai observes that Oman and Bahrain were not named in the same breath as other Gulf countries named in the US State Department annual report on human trafficking. SD writes:

The reason for this is quite simple: in Oman - as in Bahrain - local people are prepared to take jobs at all levels. They drive taxis. They work in restaurants and at hotels. They act as tourguides.

But is the reason some special virtue of the Omanis? No. The difference is that Oman and Bahrain have substantially less oil wealth than these countries. The effect of the welfare state is apparent in the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait - and Saudi Arabia. In addition, for the same fundamental reason (wealth), all these countries have admitted large numbers of guest workers. The wages for working in restaurants and at hotels are set by wages in poor parts of Asia. Oman, by contrast, has placed greater limits on guest workers.

I concur with Secret Dubai that the Omanis and Emiratis are different from each other in ways that can not be reduced to economics. (And they have similarities that distinguish them from other cultural groups.) But we have not seen how Oman would be if it became as wealthy as suddenly as the UAE.

Research on the Arab family - Khaleej Times

Dr Suweid's paper dealt with problems faced by families and the impact of changes around the world, particularly globalisation, which virtually dictates western culture and way of life to Arab societies.

Virtually dictates? How so? And by whom? Because of the presence of the temptations? Because of the pressure children influenced by TV and movies place on parents? Playing the victim doesn't solve problems. Problems are solved when you take responsibility for your actions.

Families which employ maids at home are more likely to have weak relationship with their children, besides facing the threat of not having a sense of belonging within the family, reveals a research paper....With childrens' dependence on maids come problems like influence of other culture and languages, and parental neglect, he said.

My impression from casual observation is that most UAE families have maids. The UAE market for maids is an international one, with the wage determined by the perfectly elastic supply of maids from the Philippines, etc. And maids do play a major role in child care and supervising children when both parents are out of the home.

Probably there are families that utilize maids responsibly and others do not. And those that do not most likely would be poorly managed families even without the injection of a maid. I suspect families in the West would utilize maids just as frequently if they were as inexpensive as they are in the UAE. And results would be the same.

He also highlighted the reasons for juvenile delinquency, divorce, changes in marriage patterns with most youth delaying their marriages or getting married to foreigners, which had led to increasing number of spinsters in Arab society. A new trend observed among youth was their reluctance to marry educated women, he said, adding the other issue was the tendency of families to overspend. He also spoke about the psychological problems in families which result from differences between spouses in views and thinking.

I suspect by "Arab society" this means Gulf Arab society. It is the rich Gulf countries where taking a foreign bride has become increasingly prevalent.

When I speak to females studying for a college degree about marriage they tell me four things:

(1) Possessing a college degree enhances their marriage chances. While UAE men do often take foreign brides that does not mean UAE men prefer less educated UAE women to better educated UAE women.

(2) Attending university does allow them to delay marriage until she is ready (which is after her parents are ready and anxious for her to marry).

(3) A college degree gains them some degree of freedom they would not otherwise possess.

(4) They do hope to marry, but a college degree is key to an exit strategy from the marriage if it goes bad.

Surprised that an economist is interested in such things? Don't be -- economics is about how people make decisions and how they interact. Economists are people who enjoy thinking about people and how they organize themselves. So our interests go well beyond business. Or -- to say the same thing from the opposite perspective: marriage, my students say, is business.

Non tariff barriers to inter-emirate trade

Yesterday's labor roundup post pointed to an article saying that companies that use expatriate labor cannot sponsor a worker in one emirate and employ that worker in another. If the employees are assigned to work in another emirate, then the employer must gain that emirate's permission. Companies owned by nationals are exempt from the regulation.

Among the effects of this regulation is that it the companies less burdened by regulation (the companies owned by nationals) will gain a cost advantage over their competitors. This is one constituency that favors the regulation.

More broadly, the regulation is creating a non-tariff barrier to trade between emirates. Thus, single-location companies, whether owned by nationals or not, would like protection from companies that want to operate in several emirates.

Small emirates like Ajman may believe these sponsorship rules benefit their local companies. But in fact, the effect may be just the opposite. If the Ajman market is not large enough to support a company, then the application of these rules makes it likely that companies will not locate in Ajman. In any event, rather than encouraging direct investment in the U.A.E. the rule surely discourages it and distorts it.

I wonder if the rule applies to construction companies. Or to, say, catering companies who may want to compete for business in several emirates but have only one office.

Individual emirates may want to pursue independent immigration policies for other reasons besides trade. In particular, in a country that is 80% expatriate, some emirates may be more culturally sensitized than others to controlling expatriate numbers.

But it seems difficult to deny that a motive is the creation of barriers to trade. Some other examples non-tariff barriers to inter-emirate trade:

1. Taxis licensed in one emirate can drop off passengers in another emirate, but have to return empty. The twin cities of Sharjah and Dubai have discussed reciprocity eliminating this barrier to trade, but those talks have not resulted in agreement.

2. Major dumps exist on both sides of the Sharjah-Dubai city border. In addition to externalizing externalities, they stand in the way of adding more inter-emirate roads.

3. Some of the most significant traffic congestion in Sharjah or Dubai occurs at the Sharjah-Dubai border.

4. Where additional connecting roads could be built they have not been built. An additional belt road has been constructed, but it is sufficiently far out from developed areas that few people use it.

5. Additional industrial development is occurring on both side of this border that will be in the way of any inter-emirate exchange.

As I stated in one of my very first posts, the U.A.E. suffers from same weaknesses the U.S. did under the Articles of Confederation. These weaknesses drove the design and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, especially the commerce clause.

This Andrew Coyne article from 1990 gives a nice brief, from a Canadian perspective, of the problems of federations, and the lessons that can be drawn from the design of the U.S. Constitution.

Small country, international labor market

The UAE federal government has recently announced a 25% wage increase across the board for all nationals working in the public sector. Nonnationals will receive 15%. Most of the seven emirates have announced the same increases for their public sector jobs. The others will probably follow suit if they have not done so already.

Since most working nationals are in the public sector (very few nationals work in the private sector) the intent of the policy appears to be to share the increased oil revenues of the country with the working citizens of the country. (That nonnationals share in the windfall at all presumably is because unequal pay in the same job is not healthy for organizations. At the same time, giving nonnationals 25% is not palatable politically; why should nonnationals share (fully) in the transfer of oil income from the government to its people?)

The resulting prospect for Emiratization (increased employment of nationals) in the private sector is not good, as discussed in a previous post.

Other implications for the private sector, besides Emiratization?

The fact that some nonnationals, those working in the public sector, have experienced a windfall increase in wages has no effect on the reality that the UAE is a small country and is able to import labor at world wages.

The other important reality has to do with labor mobility within the UAE. For nonnationals it is restricted. Your employer is the sponsor of your visa and has some say in whether you can change jobs. There is some rationale for this government rule: it allows the worker to make commitments not to take advantage of the employer and change jobs shortly after the employer has paid to move the worker here.

Note that financially the fact that my counterpart in a public university suddenly is paid 15 or 25% more has no effect on me. But, while we economists generally ignore envy as a possibility (in the sense that we are reluctant to assume it if other "rational" explanations are at hand), it is evident that envy exists, and that it is harmful to morale and productivity.

This consequence for labor productivity in turn harms private employers. In addition, private employers lose because of increased turnover. Their employees will tend to leave when vacancies occur in the public sector. Except: employers have some say in whether employees can leave to take another job in the UAE. The right which exists to protect the firms can also be abused by the firms. Employers may exercise this right, but only at the peril of alienating themselves from their employees. Upshot: Wise firms will use this right sparingly, when it appears that it is the employee that is taking advantage. In my opinion.

Thus, I anticipate a transition period where private employers experience increased turnover. Further, while we may be in an international labor market, it can take considerable time to fill vacancies in some specialized job categories. In sum, the private employers face a transition period with the associated hiring/training costs and prolonged vacancies which have their own costs.

In the long run, {insert your favorite joke here}, the private employers might just be able to return to the position they were in before the public sector wage hike. Over time as workers are hired, knowing at hire that the public sector jobs pay more, envy will decline -- if I can venture into psychology -- and so will its poisoning effects. Likewise, workers who take a private sector job in the UAE with the view of switching to a public sector job will not get as much sympathy when their sponsoring employers refuses permission.

Political economy of emirate to emirate transfers

The United Arab Emirates is made up of seven emirates. Abu Dhabi is the largest in area and possesses more than 90 percent of the oil and gas. Abu Dhabi transfers a considerable amount of its income to the governments and the ruling families of the other emirates most of which have little or no oil and gas. The ruling families use some of their transfers received for public purposes.

I suspect, too, that Abu Dhabi is the source of investments in major "private" projects in the other emirates. But this is not transparent. Nor is it clear whether these investments are really subsidies for projects that are unlikely to yield a good economic return.

The recent transfer of power in the UAE may have been facilitated by changes in the size of transfers from Abu Dhabi -- both emirate to emirate transfers, and "private" investment.

Is Abu Dhabi being subjected to hold-up by the other emirates?; Abu Dhabi seems to be willing to pay to keep the UAE federation together.

What would happen if Abu Dhabi made the transfers more transparent to the citizens of the UAE, and more of the Abu Dhabi transfers went directly to the citizens, bypassing the rulers of the individual emirates? Could it still keep the federation together and reduce transfers?

Can lessons learned from the Canadian, U.S., and EU experiences with federalism be applied?

Concepts: federalism, hold-up problem, opportunism.

Quote of the day: Oliver Williamson - ‘Opportunism is self interest seeking with guile often involving subtle forms of deceit, especially calculated efforts to mislead, distort, disguise, obfuscate, or otherwise confuse. This vastly complicates the problems of economic organisation. Plainly if it were not for opportunism all behaviour could be rule governed'. The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. (My emphasis.)

Nationals marrying nationals - LIBERTY
A North American Expat Lifestyle Magazine
Issue 03 March 2005

What reasons do National men cite for their disinterest in marrying the U.A.E. local women? Mostly economics. ... The common six figure dowry sum is agreed between the groom's family and the bride's parents and is paid to the bride herself. Honor and pride drive the amount higher and higher. Before the marriage has an honest chance at a happy start, the young groom is in debt and struggling to repay the wedding loan.

Another possible key to National men's interest in marrying foreign women could be the cost of divorce. To divorce his UAE national wife, he may pay as much as Dhs. 50,000 in deferred payments while a foreign wife can be divorced for as little as 2,000 and a plane ticket home.

As the saying goes in economics, exit costs are entry costs. Make it more costly to leave and men will be less likely to enter into a marriage, especially when alternatives exist.

A study conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs surveying National men married to foreign women found that 66% of the husbands said they had chosen their wives to escape potential inteference by their in-laws.

Many National women fear they will never be married. Jokes about "the in-laws" are a universal shared by most cultures, so in-law trouble is not unique to the UAE. Is it a question of extremely severe in-law trouble in the UAE that explains the number of marriages of National men to foreign brides? Or is it easy access to foreign brides?

I don't know. But I bet that families would guarantee (if they could) that they would not interfere if in return it would gain their daughters a good marriage partner. This is yet another example of time inconsistency and the value of commitment (in this case, not to interfere).

Men taking foreign brides is viewed as a national problem. (In a country where Nationals are 80% of the population, I can understand the anxiety.) Among the actions taken by the government:

In 1998, a UAE law was passed to restrict dowries to less than Dhs 10,000. Families may be fined up to US$136,000 if they stage a wedding celebration considered too elaborate.

Unlike the case of ex post in-law interference - where it is not possible to commit not to interfere - the in-laws are capable of reducing their dowry demand to a point that their daughters do marry. Evidently, the government believes that the families of daughters tend to charge too much - and that there are not enough marriages between National men and women.

Ordinary supply and demand analysis would tell us if you put a ceiling on the bride price this reduces the quantity of brides supplied and thereby reduces the number of marriages. Yes, the number of men who wish to marry would increase, but, because the number of available brides falls, the number of marriages fall.

On this analysis the policy of penalizing lavish weddings and large dowries will produce a result the opposite of what is intended.

Right? Tell me.

Cairo plans hi-tech unified call to prayer for all mosques - Gulf News

Communication control is a requirement for modern-day tyranny.

Control of a negative externality (in economist's parlance) is just a fig leaf for the true purpose. If the government was serious about noise it would ban car horns.

UPDATE: A native of Old Cairo, and economist, tells me the rest of the story. It is a story of unintended consequences. Two setups to the story.

First, anyone who puts a mosque in their apartment building or office building gains a tax exemption for the entire building. In effect, mosques have been subsidized. As a result there has been a proliferation of informal mosques. (People respond to incentives.) Each mosque must have an imam. These informal mosques do not use imams with formal training.

Second, in reaction to the threat that Islamic fundamentalists pose to the government, the government has for some time harassed all students who showed strong interest in Islam. The ones who persisted were the ones most willing to bear the harassment -- the fundamentalists.

As a consequence of these two policies, Cairo mosques have tended towards leadership that is either unqualified, or fundamentalist. The former are large in number and tend to turn up the volume at prayer time in competition with each other; the latter the government would like to control.

Hence the idea of a centrally controlled closed circuit call to prayer.

Saudi Cab Drivers harmed by their own rights - Arab News

A Saudi woman once told me Saudization of taxis would never work because a Saudi woman would never ride in a taxi driven by a Saudi man. I asked, stupidly, then wouldn't that mean there'd be demand for taxis driven by Saudi women. In Saudi Arabia, of course, women cannot drive. Which is the reason the taxi business is so big -- and makes a tempting target for Saudization. At any rate, I was too embarrassed to follow up with why. Now I've found the answer (emphasis added):

But amid the hue and cry of the Saudi drivers who want the ministry to smooth out the bumps in the road, for some reason, many of the customers prefer the foreign drivers.

"Most of the time, we dress in foreign clothes just to look like foreigners in order to get customers," said Al-Sulaimi.

Apparently, many women are pleased that the ministry slowed down the pace of Saudization in this field. "I make it a point not to get into a taxi if the driver is Saudi because I don't trust them," said Zahra Ahmadi. "Three years is not long enough to change mentalities that have been around for ages. I depend on taxis. So what is this? More obstacles to keep us home?"

More:

Umm Fahd, a mother of three, said there was a time when she could trust a driver because he was Saudi. He knew the boundaries of decency and knew that if he made a wrong a move, his family or tribe would hear about it. “That was a different generation,” she said. “The younger generation of men does not know a thing. I say this as one who has run into bad situations with Saudi taxi drivers — I’m no flirty tart of a woman giggling in the back seat.”

Some said Saudi taxi drivers are more prone to propositioning their female customers, playing romantic music and acting 'cute.' "I avoid using taxis with Saudi drivers,” said Ola Nasser. “That’s because of the ogling they do in the mirror. They think you are loose and out there for the taking just because you are taking a taxi.”

As to the reason for my headline?

Several women said that one of the reasons they preferred non-Saudi limo-drivers is that if and when there was a customer complaint there was more chance for justice taking place against a foreign driver than against a Saudi driver.

One for more the "rights can make you worse off" files. Earlier installments can be found here and here - each of these are cases of businesses refusing to rent durables to nationals because they fear they will have no legal recourse if there is damage.

Note, the behavior of a few leads to a stereotype of all, and reinforces the self-selection of bad men into the taxi business.

Last thought. When there is a customer complaint against them, do the Saudi drivers dressed "to look like foreigners in order to get customers" get treated like foreigners or like Saudis?