Economic Diversification in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, an oil based economy possesses more than a quarter of global oil reserves and has been the largest oil producer for over half a century. Oil exports generate total revenue for the nation's development expenditure in its entirety. But lately Saudi Arabia has acknowledged that the objective of long term economic development cannot be attained by depending on a single source of revenue. Therefore, Saudi Arabia embarked upon a long term economic development planning to reduce this dependence on a single export commodity and to accelerate structural diversification. Structural diversification has been one of the dominant objectives of all the eight development plans. Saudi Arabia has aggressively attempted privatization in its industrialization process in this respect. Further, in this pursuit Saudi Arabia joined the WTO and opened its economy to ease inflow of investments from abroad. This book has been written to analyze Saudi Arabia's strategies and its level of success till date to diversify its economy away from export of oil only