Construction and Infrastructure

By beating off rival bids from Brazil, Turkey and Russia, Dubai will become the first Middle Eastern city to hold the expo, which attracts hundreds of countries every five years to show off the latest achievements in architecture and technology.

There are of course a number of reasons behind South Africa’s growing competitiveness amongst global markets in the last decade or more, however one that stands out in particular is the country’s modern transportation sector. South Africa’s roads, railways and ports are already regarded as a crucial engine for economic growth and social development, and stand to develop further still through the government’s stated intent to invest billions of Rand in the years to come.

A great city facing a broad stretch of water: as a description this could apply to thousands of places because mankind usually makes its first settlement where it first makes landfall. These settlements expand as trade makes use of the highways of the sea: hinterland cities are typically established later and take longer to grow.

Truly a natural wonder of our planet, the Swiss Alps have been attracting tourists from across the world since long before the construction of the first hotels and mountain huts in the mid eighteenth century. This continues to this day with the Alpine area as a whole attracting some 100 million visitors each year.

One of the founding members of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) international economic organisation and the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), Turkey possesses the world’s 15th largest gross domestic product by purchasing power parity. Defined as an emerging market economy by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is one of the planet’s newly industrialised countries.

Signed by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on his first visit to China, the deals are for the building of a railway line, an energy project and to improve wildlife protection.

In a statement, his office said the deals with China were a "massive boost" to his government. "The rail link, particularly, is important in the context of East Africa's shared goal of ensuring quicker movement of peoples, goods and services," it quoted Mr Kenyatta as saying.

It will link the Kenyan border town of Malaba with the port of Mombasa, one of the busiest in Africa.

The construction of a metro system for the capital Riyadh will cost a total of $22 billion and will begin early next year. The government expects trains to be running along its six lines by 2019.

The president of the Arriyadh Development Authority (ADA) Ibrahim bin Mohammed al Sultan said the Riyadh Public Transport Project will be "a major driver of employment and economic development". He called it a "cornerstone" that would "enhance the quality of life" for Riyadh's population of nearly six million.

Cutting across the Isthmus of Panama, the Panama Canal is a 77.1 kilometre ship canal connecting the Atlantic Ocean, via the Caribbean Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and a hugely important conduit for international maritime trade, providing work markets with a time and cost effective crossing. Indeed the Panama Canal has had a massive transformative effect on world maritime commerce over the year, while from a local perspective it contributes some 20 percent of Panama’s total gross domestic product.

On March 1 this year ACCL International’s President, Haji Habibullah Pirzada, opened the company’s newly built headquarters in Kabul. ACCL is an Afghanistan-based company that makes use of its unique approach to partnership in a variety of post-conflict or underdeveloped regions worldwide to create wealth. It is a sign of the success of this unusual company that it had grown out of the premises it occupied since it was established in 2003.

That is the view of the African Development Bank (AfDB), who state in a new report that one-third of Africa's countries have gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of more than six percent.

The report highlights that the continent's middle class is growing rapidly with around 350 million Africans now earning between $2 and $20 a day, while the share of the population living below the poverty line in Africa has fallen from 51 percent in 2005 to 39 percent in 2012.