Bahrain

Recent decades have seen a downward convergence in corporate tax regimes as advanced, emerging and developing economies moved to grab a bigger slice of the global investment pie. Headline corporate tax rates have fallen by 20 percentage points since the early 1980s. Alongside lower average rates, special tax incentives aimed at capturing...

Decades of growth in trade and foreign investment have made the economies of the world more interdependent than ever before. This trend has been reinforced by the steady liberalisation of international trade and investment at the bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral levels. National economic specialisations, and regional economic and...

Bahrain is among the smaller economies in the GCC, but it is also one of the more diversified ones, with particularly well-developed financial services and manufacturing sectors. Despite its diversified economy, Bahrain nonetheless faced pressures in recent years as a result of the 2014-15 drop in oil prices.

By utilising technology to maximise value from existing reserves and investing in exploration, Bahrain’s energy sector is working to maintain and even increase levels of oil and gas production. Efforts in this direction have been helped significantly by the recent discovery of a large-scale, unconventional oil and gas reserve, which could...

In early September 2017 Bahrain’s state-backed hydrocarbons entities made a major new tight oil and gas find in the Khaleej Al Bahrain basin. The discovery, which covers more than 6000 sq km, contains probable reserves of around 81bn barrels of oil and 14trn standard cu feet of associated gas.

Although the world remains largely dependent upon fossil fuels for power generation, a gradual transition towards renewable sources has been taking place since the 1990s, underpinned by multilateral deals such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Doha Amendment and, more recently, the Paris Agreement. Investment and development in renewable technologies...