The Middle East Economy

The cities of Makkah and Medina, situated near the Red Sea in western Saudi Arabia, are the two holiest sites in Islam. The former is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, while the latter, some 500 km away, provided him sanctuary when he fled Makkah and is where he is buried. It was in Medina that Prophet Muhammad was instrumental in...

Saudi Arabia has been dramatically increasing the volume of investment outside of its borders in line with economic development goals. The Kingdom’s investments abroad have increased almost threefold in recent years, rising from $7.3bn in 2017 to $21.2bn in 2018, according to the “World Investment Report 2019”, published by the UN Conference...

The effort to enhance the Kingdom’s competitiveness as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) is taking place across a wide front. However, three initiatives in particular have caught the attention of the global investment community during 2019.

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...

As one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia’s trade links are well established and have a global reach. The revenue raised from outgoing shipments of this resource fund the government’s social and infrastructural programmes, and are therefore central to the Kingdom’s economy. Saudi Arabia’s non-oil exports, however, are...