The Middle East

Saudi Arabia is home to more than 27% of the GCC’s total banking assets, and is the region’s second-largest banking industry in terms of assets and the largest in terms of market capitalisation. Having achieved promising profit growth in 2019, the sector entered 2020 ready to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the Kingdom’s ambitious...

In recent years the government has sought to increase the number of nationals in the workforce through Saudiisation policies, which mandate that companies have a certain percentage of Saudi citizens in each position. However, the policy has presented significant challenges for many sectors that still rely heavily on expatriate labour.

The three decades before the 2007-08 global financial crisis were marked by the world’s financial networks becoming increasingly interconnected. Financial system regulatory convergence, the growing penetration of World Trade Organisation rules and the creation of currency unions, such as the euro, resulted in a surge in cross-border capital...

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...

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...

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.