Have you all watched the World Cup?
Last week's quadrennial World Cup kicked off, and the circle of friends was dominated by World Cup information.
Compared with previous World Cups, this World Cup in Qatar has many special features:
The first world-class event to open to spectators during the pandemic
For the first time, it has been hosted by a country that has never reached the World Cup finals
It is held for the first time in winter in the Northern Hemisphere
The first World Cup to air-conditioned stadiums
......
This also made many people pay attention to Qatar, curious about what kind of country is Qatar?
Today let's take a look at the whole picture.
1 Soaring
The cost of this World Cup alone shows how proud the country is.
Qatar spent a total of $220 billion for the event.
This is the largest expenditure in history, more than the combined investment of the World Cup in the past 30 years.
The reason for the high cost: Qatar rebuilt a city specifically for this World Cup.
In this new city, Qatar has built seven new venues, of which the main venue, the Lusail Stadium, can accommodate 80,000 people at the same time, which is the largest stadium in Qatar, with a cost of 767 million US dollars, far exceeding the cost of the main stadium of the previous World Cup.
In addition to the competition venues, Qatar has also built more than 100 new high-end luxury hotels, marinas, business districts and so on. It even cost $36 billion to open a network of metro tunnels to and from Doha.
In order to provide a comfortable environment for players and fans to watch the game, air conditioning has been installed in the entire stadium. Even the grass field in the venue enjoys a constant temperature and humidity environment.
In addition to the large amount of infrastructure funds, this World Cup prize money is also the highest ever.
The winning team can receive $42 million in prize money, an increase of $4 million from 2018. The other 32 teams will receive an additional $1.5 million in subsidies.
Such a willingness to invest, on the one hand, Qatar wants to take this opportunity to show itself, on the other hand, it is really rich.
After all, the country floats on the oil layer, and the oil and gas reserves are among the highest in the world.
At present, Qatar has proven oil reserves of 2.5 billion tons, ranking 13th in the world.
Natural gas reserves account for nearly 13% of the world's total, ranking third after Iran and Russia.
LNG exports account for 20.7% of the world's total, only slightly behind Australia and the second largest in the world.
With such abundant scarce resources, it is purely God's reward to eat.
Even as the pandemic overwhelms the world economy, Qatar's GDP per capita is the same
It can reach 68,000 US dollars, ranking second only to Singapore in Asia.
It is expected that after the World Cup, the per capita GDP will exceed 100,000 US dollars, directly holding the position of the richest man in East Asia.
All this is a miracle for a backward country that has been modernized for less than 50 years.
2 The road to counterattack
Don't look at Qatar now rich and fancy.
At the beginning of the last century, Qatar, a British colony, was a completely inconspicuous small country.
At that time, oil and gas resources were in the hands of Britain and the United States, and the people of Qatar mainly relied on pearl mining and fishing.
It was not until Qatar officially declared its independence in 1971 that it went on the road to counterattack.
After independence, Qatar focused on oil extraction, but in the early 1990s, the collapse of oil prices brought Qatari oil fields to the brink of bankruptcy.
That's when Qatar remembered that it still had one of the world's biggest natural gas treasures: the Northern Gas Field.
But extractors are reluctant to take over the natural gas business, mainly because natural gas transportation is troublesome, pipelines need to be laid, and some countries in need are difficult to transport because of the distance, and the upfront investment cost is a bit large.
Although not favored by everyone, Qatar has no better choice. In order to save the economy, it began to focus on natural gas extraction.
One of the most important problems to be solved is the problem of transportation. Since gas transportation is difficult, try to liquefy natural gas.
However, if you want to liquefy natural gas, you must make the storage temperature of natural gas reach minus 162 degrees, which is difficult to achieve with the level of technology at that time. However, with a lot of money investment, liquefied natural gas (LNG) was finally successfully applied.
After the technological breakthrough, Qatar has become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.
Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, China and other countries are all major customers of Takal.
In 2020, Qatar's LNG exports were approximately 32% to Europe and 68% to Asia.
The epidemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the past two years have not only not affected Qatar's economy, but the rising prices of international oil and natural gas have made Qatar a lot of money.
3 All people lie flat
Qatar is not large, about 11,500 square kilometers of land area, which is smaller than Tianjin.
The population here is also small, with about 400,000 citizens, and if everyone is admitted to watch the World Cup, they will not even be able to fill 8 stadiums.
The population is small and the income is high, let alone social welfare.
Every year, Qatar again invests significant amounts of money and resources to ensure that every citizen receives the social security and welfare benefits they deserve.
Qatar has a universal welfare policy.
All citizens are entitled to various social insurances such as old-age insurance, work-related injury insurance and maternity insurance.
Although Qatar's domestic economic development is not high, the standard of living of the population is generally high due to the low unemployment rate practised in the country.
Taking into account the retirement of the elderly, Qatar has also increased the contribution rate of pension insurance from the previous 40% to 50%.
Children's education is even more worry-free, with Qatar investing more than $5 billion a year in public sectors such as education. Children go from primary school to university, and the tuition is paid by the state.
The second is medical treatment, and the cost of major and minor illnesses is free of charge in the country. Not only these big items, but even the cost of water, coal and electricity in life, Qatar has covered up for its own people.
There is no work pressure at work, working 3 hours a day can earn 100,000 a month, sitting on thousands of square meters of house, Lamborghini freedom.
Don't be sour, this is also an ordinary middle class in the local area.
In short, there are no poor people here, only the rich and the super rich.
The way to "get out of the circle" with money is so "trench", directly making the World Cup the "most expensive in history", so losing money and making money, it's not that rich people really can't do it.
Bonnie Butler