This came in a paper submitted on the second day of the 3rd Documentation and Electronic Archiving Conference, currently being held at the Dubai International Convention Centre.

Dr. Zainal Abideen Wafaee, Statistics Expert at Dubai Municipality's Statistics Centre and Head of the Scientific Committee of the conference, made these predictions in a paper on "The Changing Profiles of Non-Oil Foreign Exports and their Revealed Comparative Advantages in Dubai Emirate". He noted that Dubai's GDP in 2004 totalled Dh110.7 billion which constituted 29.2 per cent of the UAE's overall GDP, which last year stood at Dh378.8 billion.

"Dubai's GDP has been growing at a medium pace over the past few years as indicated by official statistics. In 1995, it was Dh41.3 billion while it rose to Dh10.7 billion in 2004, which means an overall growth of 98.7 per cent during this 10-year period and an annual average growth of 11 per cent. On the national level, this average growth during the same period was 9.8 per cent per annum," said Dr. Wafaee.

He noted that changes in comparative advantage should reflect changes in factor endowment, but increasingly, changes in trade policies also affect the emirate's trade performance. Based on the arguments in stages of comparative advantage theory , the paper explained the performance of exports in Non-Oil Foreign Exports (NOFE) of Dubai economy over the period 1998-2001 and examined the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) indices between exports sectors in Dubai. Wafaee noted that Dubai's economic growth could be described as balanced and poised for remarkable leap thanks to the wise economic policies that aimed at diversifying the sources of national income.

"The retail and wholesale trade as well as the services sector play a pivotal role in the emirate's economic growth. The financial sector comprising banks and insurance companies have also contributed tremendously towards turning the city into one of the most important financial centres of the region," Wafaee said in his paper.

In order to keep up the pace of this superb economic growth, the paper recommended, non-oil trade should be further boosted and there should be more coordination between different local establishments entrusted with overseeing economic activities. "There should be more cooperation between local and federal organisations. Besides, the economic sector should be provided with technical and financial support by these organisations. Subsidies and other monetary facilities should always be an option," said Dr. Wafaee. Another recommendation made in the paper was that more efforts should be made in imparting high-end technical training to national manpower in order to derive maximum benefit from the advanced technologies in managing business sectors.

Meanwhile, the second day of the International Conference on Documentation and Electronic Archiving saw some 20 papers on the four modules of the conference: Knowledge Management, Libraries & Documentation, Statistics & Information and Geographic Information Systems.

In a paper on Arabic thesauri Between Arabisation & Composition, Dr. Mohammed Fathi Abdel Hadi, Informatics Professor at the Cairo University, said the number of Arabic thesauri, from 1974, up to now is only thirty, and most of them depended on translation from foreign thesauri.

"We must encourage building of multilingual thesauri with terms in Arabic at the first, and it is necessary to build Arabic thesauri in light of the characteristics of the Arabic language and the Arabic heritage in different fields," he said. There is a need to specify a national library or information centre as a clearinghouse or deposit centre for Arabic thesauri.

"The building of Arabic thesauri must depend on teamwork supported by efficient institutions, and it is necessary to benefit from computerised programs, and standards for building and updating thesauri, in addition to make the thesauri in electronic form, and to make them accessible through the Internet," Dr. Abdel Hadi said.