Barring an unprecedented and wholly non-expectable immense natural catastrophe and the slightly greater probabilities of another Middle East war or massive occurrences of domestic or imported terrorism, the outlook for Saudi Arabia’s development in 2008 is for another year of very significant growth.
It is an absolute no-brainer that a country that derives about half of its GDP and four-fifths of its government revenues from oil and is the world’s leading producer of the commodity will thrive at a time when the barrel sells at close to double what this country needs for its fiscal sustenance — and the oil price outlook for the next few years is for no drop below this break-even point.
Tasks for 2008
That is not to say that Saudi Arabia won’t see a surge in challenges, which in the next 12 months could expand beyond the habitual challenges of properly managing oil production, diversifying the economy and creating employment to meet the needs of the kingdom’s young populace. Tasks which the Saudi decision makers will have to succeed in are: Making good on regulatory improvements, opening the enigmatic market, and controlling the dollar trap. The investment buzz words include petrochemicals, railroads, utilities, telecommunications, industrial cities, general construction, tourism, and education; add question marks under the headers environment, Saudization, regional politics, and international reputation.
In the second year after the kingdom’s accession to the World Trade Organization, Saudi Arabia got an exceedingly positive grade from the World Bank Group’s lectern in the master class on the right way of conducting business on the global playing field. According to the Doing Business 2008 score card by World Bank and International Finance Corporation, Saudi Arabia was among the world’s top 10 achievers for improvements of their business climate in 2007 and now is one of the 25 countries with the most business-friendly regulations on issues such as starting and operating an enterprise, trade and taxation, dispute settlements, and also the ease of winding down a business.
Reforms cited by the World Bank and IFC as reasons for the improvement in the Saudi business climate included a reduction in the time for setting up a business to 15 days from 39 days, the establishment of a credit bureau for the commercial sector, abolition of a minimum capital requirement as multiple of per-capita GDP, and improvements in import/export procedures.
Saudi Arabia has initiated or announced further reform steps including plans to professionalize and partly privatize its stock market and revamp its index structures. In longer term moves, King Abdullah also recently took forward reforms of the judiciary and stipulated important details of the kingdom’s new succession planning procedures.
The innovations and reforms notwithstanding, the existential wheels of the Saudi economy are the same that they were in 1998 when then Crown Prince Abdullah made the first bold public statements on the kingdom’s need to diversify away from oil dependency.
The two main wheels in the national assets chamber are hydrocarbons and population growth. However, where these wheels had been spinning in a rather contradictory motion in the last phase of the 20th century under conditions of slow oil revenues and high population growth, the increased speed of the oil wheel in the past seven years has reversed the deficit tendency of the kingdom’s finances and is advancing the probability of turning Saudi Arabia’s domestic labor pool into the long-term resource that it ought to be instead of a cost factor weighing heavy on fiscal situation. The success of this economic sea change will depend on the success of the education and economic reform steps that are ranked top on the current Saudi agenda.
Shrinking debt burden
The magnitude of the virtuous collaboration of the two economic wheels in Saudi Arabia emerges in the correlation of revenues and education investments. In 1999, national debt had climbed to 115% of GDP because of the high social costs (and a few military expenditures) that had burdened the coffers in the period of low oil prices which hit bottom in the $15 range in 1998.
As the oil price picked up in the new millennium, the kingdom could reduce its debt to 28% of GDP by the start of 2007 while boosting budget allocations to education and qualification measures. For the two years of 2006 and 2007, the total funding allocated to human resources development reached $49 billion and a flood of new schools and colleges was devised.
Whereas the forecast for total nominal GDP and oil revenues anticipates a slight contraction in the year totals for 2007, the debt burden is expected to shrink further to less than 25% of GDP. Real GDP growth is expected at 3.6% to 3.8% for 2007 with an improvement to possibly 5.8% in 2008. Non-oil GDP increases of up to 7% have been forecasted for 2007 and 2008. Inflation pressures are expected to increase from around 3.5% in 2007 to 4% or more in 2008 but will be less than in other GCC countries.
However, perception of the kingdom’s socioeconomic outlook would be seriously distorted if one reviews solely capacity developments on the production side of oil and petrochemicals or industrial goods. Population matters are the country’s real story. The demographics of Saudi Arabia forecast a net population gain of 4.5 million people between 2007 and 2015.
With a projected 29.3 million inhabitants by 2015, the country’s population increase and total labor force will be considerably less than the respective increases and totals in Turkey and Egypt, not to mention Pakistan and India across the Gulf which will add 27 and 143 million persons to their population bases in the next seven years.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s demographic rise in the oil age signifies a nine time multiplying of the population between the baseline year 1950 and 2015, a ratio that exceeds the growth rates in most other countries. With so much increase concentrated in a short period and given the national circumstances of high energy needs due to climate conditions and shortages of easily available fresh water, it becomes very clear why Saudi Arabia is bound to face challenges on its socioeconomic path in the next two decades.
Growing importance
Seeing these factors on one hand and the cultural parameters of an expansion-oriented religious mindset on the other, the role of Saudi Arabia is one of a medium to long-term player destined to seek a position of strength and growing civilizational, economic, and technological importance in the Middle East and Western Asia.
On the short-term horizon, the performance of the Saudi economy in 2007/2008 is based on corporate earnings that improved in the second half of 2007 and are expected to be strong in 2008, on robust consumer confidence that will be reflected in spending growth for 2007, albeit at a lesser rate than in the record retail spending growth year of 2006, and on the continued course of expansionary government spending on infrastructure, industrial, and social investments.
The reinvestments of Saudi wealth at present and in the coming years are staggered at a volume of $350 billion in oil and gas, petrochemicals, water and power, industry, and construction. Construction of six new economic cities is targeted with a price expectation in the range of $100 billion, which almost looks understated considering the scope of the planned urban realms and the creation of jobs for more than a million people.
Putting the number of jobs under development into perspective, Saudi statistics said the country’s private sector workforce was around 5.5 million persons in 2005. But almost 90% of the labor force are foreigners while the current unemployment rates of nationals in the kingdom (officially 6.9% in 2005 with an increase to over 9% in 2006) are surprisingly high for a country in the middle of a boom cycle which moreover has been pursuing its avowed Saudization campaign for preferential employment of citizens for at least a decade.
At the junction of 2007 and 2008, the Saudi Stock Exchange is a good proposition for playing catch-up with the bourses of the other member countries in the Cooperation Council of Arab Countries in the Gulf. Although the sentiment among regional analysts has been for the greater part of 2007 that the correction phase of Arab emerging bourses was winding down, the Tadawul Index stayed sluggish for most of the year and on some mid-October days was a tad negative when compared with the start of the year. Retail investors who had been burned worse than most neighbors in the correction of 2006 were slower than these neighbors in returning to the stock game. The SSE started what could become a local bull march in November of 2007, though, and valuations suggested in November that the SSE has some of the Gulf’s most attractive price plays to offer.
The sub-sectors with the strongest gains to the end of November were insurance — an outlier in more than one way as the sector supplied a big chunk of the year’s primary market action and the newly listed companies started trading on a wave of speculative interest from retail investors — followed by agriculture and industrial stocks. Banking, cement, and telecom values on the other hand are regarded by a number of analysts as sectors where 2008 could see quite good gains.
To keep the dollar peg or not
A fashionable debate in the third and fourth quarters of 2007 is the dollar peg of the riyal and other GCC currencies. Will Saudi Arabia revalue the riyal, or perhaps switch its peg from the dollar to a currency basket? One aspect of this issue is the plan for a GCC economic and monetary union, which has been put on the agenda for 2010.
The balance of currencies is important for a monetary union and the EU’s pioneering acts in building the euro zone have shown an example of firmly aligning currencies in preparation for the step — but it is not unperceivable that the union could come even if some central banks take a slow step away from the dollar peg. However, the while the GCC union is still verbally on the table, the indications of actual implementation on the 2010 timeline are rather weak and ahead of a GCC meeting in Qatar in early December 2007, the political, institutional, and other nation-level obstacles to the step seemed larger than the currency issue.
The second specter raised in conjunction with the dollar peg is that of imported inflation and self-coercion into following the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. Analysts have taken differing views in this debate: some regional investment researchers, such as EFG-Hermes, reasoned that prioritizing of domestic concerns in determining of interest rates will be likely to change the Saudi approach away from following the Fed and eventually could lead to increased currency flexibility in the medium term; by contrast, analyst views from inside the Saudi economy seem to be leaning toward continuity of the monetary status quo that has served the kingdom for 21 years. The SABB financial group wrote in its fourth quarter economic report for 2007, “we continue to believe firmly that the Saudi riyal is not going to be revalued.”
Beyond the monetary issues, Saudi Arabia faces a definite need to assert its role as economic value producer and viable business location on the international map. This is where the improvements in the regulations for foreign direct investments and economic participation of non-citizens are crucial. The political perception of Saudi Arabia in Western populations is marred by negative image factors on women’s and human rights, perceived shortfalls in tolerance and individual freedoms, and, in general terms, substantial cultural distance.
In the past, the cultural distance to developed countries stayed in place while the economic interaction happened in the oil sector through trade and joint ventures with a few corporate partners. Intensification of trade ties and funds flows has occurred on all levels in 2007 from outgoing remittances by foreign workers and heightened investments in global petrochemicals in Europe, the Far East, and the US through the state-backed petrochemicals giant SABIC which expanded its existing international operations and bought GE Plastics n a strategic move. In parallel, the Saudi aim is to attract foreign direct investments into the kingdom at a much greater rate — talk is of luring in $80 billion within 10 or 20 years.
Business leaders with experience in Saudi Arabia advise patience in expecting the implementation of reforms and changes. It would be naïve and dangerous to assume that the kingdom would shape shift into a society molded after the wishes of its economic partners in the developed countries. The question is if the reform impetus will be sufficiently strong to change the hermetic Saudi economy of the past into a hermeneutic state exemplary of a third millennium Islamic national identity and of the new Arab role in the global community.
From the side of Saudi interests, it is clear that this fortuitous ratio of oil revenues and current account surpluses will not stay as strong as it can be expected for the seven years starting in 2002 and lasting into 2008 or a perhaps a little more. The global economy will not stay on a broad expansion course forever, and the country wants to be ready when the oil price cycle swings again.
