The Middle East

The emergence of Kuwait City’s sparkling new office towers over the past five years reflects the accelerating pace of growth and development in the nation. These structures also symbolise the country’s changing economic climate, which is producing more business opportunities for contractors, consultants and investors. “Both domestic and foreign...

As the country’s demand for electricity continues to grow, expanding domestic power generating capacity is an increasingly important issue. While the government has worked to add capacity in recent years – notably, the first phase of the 2000-MW Sabiya power station came on-line in 2011 – more will need to be done to avoid any potential shortfalls...

While many members of the GCC have announced high-profile renewable energy projects in recent years, Kuwait has taken comparatively little action to diversify its energy base so far. Its domestic reserves of oil and natural gas could in theory power the country for the next several hundred years. Existing renewable energy technologies are expensive...

For years the availability of cheap and abundant oil has meant that the development of the country’s natural gas reserves has only recently come to the fore. However, growing demand for power and water generation, environmental concerns, advances in technology and the rising price of oil have combined to make the extraction and processing of this...

The regularity with which the Kuwaiti government has issued bonds over the past decade has driven aggregate bond growth – sovereign and corporate – and helped to establish the country as a leading issuer of bonds’ sharia-compliant equivalents, sukuks. While the global economic crisis has seen a dropoff in bond and sukuk issues across the...