Jordan when oil runs out

I was thinking the other day about how the gulf states will probably be screwed when the oil runs out. I based this line of thinking on the fact they still depend on foreign labor and the fact that their local labor is largely incompetent.

That is when I started to ponder what would happen to Jordan 25 yrs from now when there is no more oil. The picture did not look good, despite all the talk about nuclear energy and using tar sand(which is very bad environmentally), I do not believe that we are doing enough or perusing the right combination of energy technologies. I talked about this a lot in previous posts.

The other area that got me worried is the fact that we have 13% unemployment while more 400000 Jordanians work abroad, mainly in the gulf states and send money back home. This money almost makes up one sixth of the Jordanian economy. What would happen 20yrs from now when these jobs and money are no longer there.

Jordan has to think long an hard about this and find a way to create jobs at twice the normal rate. Personally, I think that we can do it(yes we can;) A couple of weeks ago, there was a first page news paper article about factories in the QIZs closing or giving people the pink slip because of the situation with the global economy. It got me thinking about the fact that we import cloths from Turkey and China while at the same time exporting the same to the US. If the US as market is closed at the moment why not use this production capacity to satisfy the local market, instead of importing.