In most GCC countries, for some time, over 50% of employed nationals have been working in the public sector—a very large percentage by international standards, as in advanced economies, public sectors usually account for around 20% of total employment.
Derasat in the News
This trend, combined with a growing youth population, poses a challenge to the GCC’s capacity to create sufficient job opportunities – a novel problem for wealthy economies.
In response to two recent Abu Dhabi mergers – National Bank of Abu Dhabi with FGB (a combined market value of US$30 billion) and the International Petroleum Investment Company with Mubadala Development Company (with combined assets of $127bn) – one may wonder: why, and why now?
The period following WW2 witnessed the emergence of a military conflict between American and the Soviet union. The capitalist and socialist-communist economic models also crossed swords as a subplot of this global conflict, and the…
Markets are complex, and consumers often struggle to understand pricing decisions, resorting to conspiracy theories. For example, in countries with floating petrol prices – the UAE is a new member of this club after subsidy reforms – consumers are convinced that…
For Saudi Arabia and the remaining Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and United Arab Emirates), which together account for around 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves and the lion’s share of OPEC’s collective output, their future oil strategy should be an exclusively GCC affair, away from the stress and dysfunction of OPEC.
Subsidies in the GCC are a tradition that is particularly difficult to justify, and Twain’s maxim has likely underlain some of the challenges faced by the Gulf governments as they have tried to scale back subsidies. Biases in the way that humans think present additional obstacles to reform.
This is the Thatcher revolution for Saudi Arabia?,” is the question that The Economist recently posed to Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, regarding his comprehensive economic reform plan…
The governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have long been searching for the best way to diversify their economies, and in the wake of falling oil prices, they have accelerated their search.