The class will meet all morning for nine days at Georgetown’s lovely campus in Doha’s Education City. Some excursions will be offered in the afternoons. The course will culminate with a field trip to the Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas terminal, one of the most technologically advanced in the world. The course may include some local residents from the Doha campus area. The course will apply to the Non-Western Studies requirement in the BALS curriculum. Students will be required to attend an orientation class on the DC campus, and a take-home examination will be administered after students return to the Washington DC area.

The following topics will be covered:

1. Rentier states: these are states which do not tax individuals and yet supply public goods like infrastructure and free higher education from fiscal surpluses generated from natural resource exports. This has interesting implications for both the political and the economic systems for the Gulf countries.

2. Dutch Disease: Over-spending by the government on infrastructure leads to transfer of resources away from traditional industries and may cause inflation. Application to the Gulf .

3. State-Owned Oil Enterprises: The new titans like Saudi Aramco. How are they different from the traditional multinationals like Exxon and Shell?

4. Labor Markets and Migrant Labor: The labor shortage in the Gulf and the labor and living conditions of the immigrants.

5. Islamic Finance: Is this a serious alternative to Western style capitalist banking and finance? Or is it just a "boutique" in the world of finance and banking?

6. Sovereign Wealth Funds and FDI