It’ll be interesting to see how the Arab states will diversify their economies in the next decade. There’s really not much to exploit there except oil, so unless they pump out enough money to basically rest on their investments in perpetuity I’m really not sure what to expect.
They have deserts for solar energy and cheap workers. What else do they need?
Food and fresh water
Desalination is cheap enough for human consumption. It can be too expensive to grow food but food can be imported.
I would actually love to see Saudi Arabia take the lead on food engineering. They might lack fresh water, but they have immense amounts of land and sun to play with.
The only alternative I can see is a mass reforestation project.
Unfortunately what they are doing is buying Agri land abroad and repatriating the goods.
Capitalism 🤷♀️
That’s why the Saudi’s aren’t going to piss off the US, China, Russia, or India. Their strategy only works in peacetime.
Well the Americans bend over for them and the Russians need them more, it’s only China they have to behave for.
Solar powered greenhouses and desalination.
It’s hard to load solar energy on oil tanker.
Joke apart, how would they make money with solar energy? Oil is a very limited resources that can be transported very easily. Every country in the world needs oil but only a few country can supply it so the business model is extremely straight forward: export oil to the countries that has the money to buy it.
Now what is the business model with solar energy? Every country in the world has sun and electricity is hard to export over long distance so what are they doing with it ?
They can do anything, from data centers to any industrial production line. At worst they recycle aluminum.
Not every country has that much sun and the space. You don’t want to clear forests or farmland for solar energy.
The cost of running a data centre in the desert would become cost prohibitive at the drawing board stage.
Hydrogen Production would be the logical thing.
Tourism. The plan is tourism. These projects are to attract tourists to look at them
Who the fuck wants to go to a desert theme park?
I mean that’s basically Las Vegas.
I assume you mean gulf States, cause most Arab States don’t have that much oil if any. A lot of them have agricultural economy.
Nothing wrong with it especially since they’ve more than enough reserves to maintain their Dollar peg.
Paywall
They (the royal family) have grown up pissing away massive amounts of money. Why stop now?
Better mega projects than bombing Yemenis and feuding pointlessly with Iran.
The wisdom of these gigprojects in the middle of a desert aside, it would be awesome more governments would stop trying to run themselves into the ground for profit. Because who the fuck is benefiting if a country is taking more in taxes then they are providing their citizens in services?
Which countries are running on a profit, exactly?
Loads of countries have budget surpluses.
Loads? These aren’t exactly major nations here and the bigger ones are oil producers.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-top-budget-surplus.html
I asked which ones. Denmark has a surplus, but that’s accidental and no one’s trying to keep it that way.
And if you’re about to give Qatar as an example, the point is moot.
This doesn’t answer the question.
Well none, but the Neo-liberal rhetoric around “balancing the budget” that infests most of the governments of the west.
What’s so bad about balancing the budget? Inflation is too high and taxes are too low.
I think the problem is mostly with how neo-liberals tend to try to balance the budget
KSA actually hands out money to citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_Account_Program_(Saudi_Arabia)
