UAE ranks first in the world for entrepreneurship conditions for a fifth year running
The Emirates again topped the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which measures not success stories but the environment for creating a business: finance, regulation, taxes, infrastructure and digitalisation. Five years at number one is a position, not a ranking.
The UAE holds first place in the world for entrepreneurship conditions for the fifth consecutive year, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the largest international research programme in the field. What GEM measures matters: not the count of success stories but the environment in which businesses are created and grow.
What the assessment covers
- Access to finance
- Regulation
- Taxes
- Infrastructure
- Level of digitalisation
- Government support
Five years at the top signals a systemic result rather than a one-off jump: a model in which a business can be launched, scaled and taken international quickly.
What sits behind it in practice
Abstract "government support" is easy to verify against concrete decisions from the past year, each of which removes a specific piece of friction:
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- Corporate tax exemption for small business with revenue up to AED 3 million — extended to the end of 2029.
- Permission for free zone companies to open mainland branches — the choice between benefits and local market access is gone.
- A unified penalty system with mandatory publication of violation lists and a defined appeal.
- Villa building permits in minutes via AI, and the merger of Land Department and immigration services.
Why an entrepreneurship ranking is a property story
The chain is short. Companies mean offices, and company employees mean housing. Dubai's current office shortage — 6.1% vacancy, Grade B rents up 31.5% — is a direct consequence of the very entrepreneurial climate GEM measures.
For a residential investor what matters here is the character of the demand. A market growing on inflows of entrepreneurs and specialists behaves differently from one growing on the resale of holes in the ground: it has an operating basis — people who need somewhere to live because they work here.
Based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study.
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