According to Trading Economics global macro models and analysts, Saudi Arabia’s GDP is predicted to reach 790.00 USD billion by the end of 2021.
Is Saudi Arabia wealthy or impoverished?
Riyadh is a sprawling metropolis in Saudi Arabia that also serves as the country’s capital. It is home to approximately seven million people out of the country’s total population of 32.5 million. Despite the abundance of data on the country’s constantly rising economy, updated statistics and data on Saudi Arabia’s and Riyadh’s poverty rates are missing, since the Saudi government appears to keep such information under wraps. Nonetheless, following ten facts regarding poverty in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia may help to illuminate the issue.
Facts About Poverty in Riyadh
- Despite having one of the world’s most robust economies, Saudi Arabia’s social welfare programs and job development appear to be unable to keep up with the country’s rapid population increase. Saudi Arabia’s population was under six million in 1970 and has been rapidly growing since then.
- The Saudi royal family is the wealthiest in the world, with a net worth of over $1.4 trillion thanks to abundant oil reserves, but the country as a whole is impoverished, with an estimated 20% of the population living in poverty.
- Three young guys were arrested and imprisoned in 2011 after uploading video footage of underprivileged individuals in Riyadh to YouTube. The video featured a documentary on a poor neighborhood in the city, including personal interviews and a call to action for the Saudi Arabian government to do more to combat poverty. Thousands of people expressed their support or disapproval of the arrests on social media.
- Despite the fact that the initiatives appear to be ineffectual, the government under King Abdullah has spent $37 billion on housing, unemployment, and other programs as of 2012 in an attempt to aid the growing number of poor people.
- The country owns around 22% of the world’s oil and generates about half of its GDP from it. Government authorities want to minimize the economy’s reliance on oil through Saudi Vision 2030, an action plan to privatize additional businesses and reduce unemployment from 11% to 7%. The plan even includes specific aims for Saudi citizens’ health, such as the construction of sports and physical activity facilities.
- Youth unemployment rates rise in tandem with poverty rates. Nearly a quarter of all unemployed people are in their twenties.
- Image-conscious, high-status individuals The existence of poverty in Saudi Arabia has been downplayed by Saudis, and the topic has been avoided in Saudi Arabian media. It was a taboo issue in Saudi media until 2002, when King Abdullah paid a visit to a slum in Riyadh, allowing for proper news coverage of a slum in Riyadh.
- Saudi Arabia’s government provides free education, healthcare, and burials to its inhabitants, but it does not have a welfare system or food stamps. Pensions and payments for food and electricity bills are also provided to the impoverished and disenfranchised. Despite these efforts, many families are said to still rely on donations from ordinary residents.
- Because Saudi Arabia is a predominantly Muslim country, citizens follow the religious zakat obligation, which requires individuals and corporations to pay 2.5 percent of their wealth to charity. The government collects this money and distributes it to the impoverished.
- Women who are widowed or single have financial difficulties because Islamic law and Saudi society dictate that men should be the primary breadwinners. Before being recruited, certain establishments demand written approval from a guardian. In 2015, women made up 56% of the unemployed youth aged 15 to 25.
Regardless their efforts to alleviate poverty, Saudi and American researchers allege that the royal family obtains large sums of money through corrupt practices and schemes. A long-term solution may be adopted in the future as a result of Saudi Vision 2030’s initiatives and the country’s generous and religious ethos.
What is Dubai’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?
Dubai’s economy has a gross domestic output of US$102.67 billion as of 2018. The construction boom was curtailed by the Great Recession.
It’s been described as “centrally-planned free-market capitalism” by the International Herald Tribune. Oil production, which once contributed for half of Dubai’s gross domestic product, now accounts for less than 1%. Wholesale and retail commerce accounted for 26% of total GDP in 2018, while transportation and logistics accounted for 12%, banking, insurance activities, and capital markets accounted for 10%, manufacturing accounted for 9%, real estate 7%, construction 6%, and tourism 5%.
For Western manufacturers, Dubai has become an important port of call. The port region was home to the majority of the new city’s banking and financial centers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Dubai remained a vital trading route. Dubai has unrestricted gold commerce and was the center of a “brisk smuggling trade” of gold ingots to India, where gold imports were prohibited, until the 1990s.
Dubai’s economy is now centered on tourism, with hotels being built and real estate being developed. Port Jebel Ali, built in the 1970s, boasts the world’s largest man-made harbor, but it’s also becoming a centre for service industries like IT and banking, thanks to the new Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Emirates Airline, situated at Dubai International Airport, was formed by the government in 1985 and is still state-owned; in 2015, it carried over 49.7 million passengers.
Dubai is the #1 business gateway for the Middle East and Africa, according to Healy Consultants. In order to develop Dubai property, the government has established industry-specific free zones throughout the city. Dubai Internet City, which is now part of TECOM (Dubai Technology, Electronic Commerce and Media Free Zone Authority), is one of these enclaves, with members including EMC Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Microsoft, Sage Software, and IBM, as well as media companies like MBC, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Dubai Knowledge Village (KV), an education and training hub, has been established to support the Free Zone’s other two clusters, Dubai Internet City and Dubai Media City, by offering facilities to train the clusters’ future knowledge workers. Companies engaged in outsourcing activities can set up offices in the Dubai Outsourcing Zone, which offers concessions from the Dubai government. In most parts of Dubai, internet access is restricted, with a proxy server screening out sites that are believed to be against the UAE’s cultural and religious values.
Is Saudi Arabia a wealthier country than India?
India vs. Saudi Arabia: A Comparison of Economic Indicators With a GDP of $2.7 trillion, India is the world’s seventh largest economy, while Saudi Arabia ranks 18th with $786.5 billion. India and Saudi Arabia were placed 6th vs. 124th and 150th vs. 41st, respectively, in terms of GDP 5-year average growth and GDP per capita.
Was Saudi Arabia wealthy before it discovered oil?
Saudi Arabia was a poor country until oil was found and successfully exploited. Despite the fact that Abd al-power Aziz’s grew after the kingdom was unified, he struggled to make ends meet.
Is Hajj profitable for Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from Hajj pilgrims in 2017, broken down by country. Saudi Arabia received 940.8 million dollars in income from Hajj pilgrims from Indonesia in 2017. The Hajj pilgrimage costs an average of $5,600 USD for an Indonesian pilgrim.
Is Saudi Arabia the same size as India?
Saudi Arabia has a land area of roughly 2,149,690 square kilometers, while India has a land area of around 3,287,263 square kilometers, making India 53 percent larger than Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia now has a population of 34.2 million people (1.3 billion more people live in India).
What is the size of Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia, formally known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia located on the Arabian Peninsula. It is the fifth-biggest country in Asia, the second-largest in the Arab world, and the largest in Western Asia, with a land area of around 2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi). It is surrounded on the west by the Red Sea, on the north by Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait, on the east by the Persian Gulf, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, on the southeast by Oman, and on the south by Yemen. Bahrain is an island nation off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are separated by the Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world to have coastlines on both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and its terrain is mostly made up of dry desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains. Riyadh is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia. Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holy cities, are located in the country.
Pre-Islamic Arabia, which includes modern-day Saudi Arabia, was home to a number of ancient societies and civilizations; Saudi Arabia’s prehistory has some of the world’s earliest indications of human activity. In what is now Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest religion, Islam, was born. The Islamic prophet Muhammad brought the people of Arabia together and established a single Islamic religious polity in the early seventh century. Following his death in 632, his adherents quickly expanded Muslim power outside of Arabia, conquering vast swaths of land (from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to parts of Central and South Asia in the east) in a few of decades. The Rashidun (632661), Umayyad (661750), Abbasid (7501517), and Fatimid (9091171) caliphates, as well as countless other dynasties in Asia, Africa, and Europe, were formed by Arab dynasties originating in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
The modern-day Saudi Arabia was once divided into four historical regions: Hejaz, Najd, and sections of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia (‘Asir). King Abdulaziz formed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. (known as Ibn Saud in the West). Through a series of conquests, he united the four areas into a single state, beginning in 1902 with the acquisition of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the Al Saud. Since then, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy, with the king, princes of the Al Saud royal family, and the country’s traditional elites in charge of a very authoritarian regime. Although the religious establishment’s dominance has been considerably undermined in the 2010s, the ultraconservative Wahhabi theological movement within Sunni Islam has been described as a “predominant characteristic of Saudi society.” Saudi Arabia maintains its status as a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its official religion, Arabic as its official language, and Riyadh as its capital under its Basic Law. The two holiest mosques in Islam, Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, are frequently referred to as “the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.”
On March 3, 1938, petroleum was discovered, followed by many further discoveries in the Eastern Province. Saudi Arabia has subsequently surpassed the United States as the world’s second-largest oil producer and exporter, with the world’s second-largest oil reserves and sixth-largest gas reserves. The kingdom is the only Arab country to be a member of the G20 major economies and is classified as a World Bank high-income economy with a very high Human Development Index.
The kingdom spends 8% of its GDP on the military (second most in the world after Oman), making it the world’s third largest military spender behind the United States and China. From 2015 to 2019, it was the world’s top arms importer, getting half of all US arms shipments to the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, according to the BICC, is the world’s 28th most militarized country, with the second-best military equipment in the region, after Israel. Since the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in the late 2010s, there have been repeated requests to restrict military sales to Saudi Arabia, primarily because of alleged war crimes in Yemen. The state has been criticized for a number of reasons, including its role in the Yemeni Civil War, alleged sponsorship of Islamic terrorism, and its poor human rights record, which has been marked by the excessive and often extrajudicial use of capital punishment, failure to adopt adequate measures against human trafficking, state-sponsored discrimination against religious minorities and atheists, and antisemitism, as well as its strict interpretation of Sharia law.
Saudi Arabia is regarded as a regional as well as a medium power. Saudi Arabia’s economy is the largest in the Middle East and the world’s eighteenth largest. Saudi Arabia also has one of the world’s youngest populations, with over half of the country’s 34.2 million people under the age of 25. Saudi Arabia is a founding member of the United Nations, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League, Arab Air Carriers Organization, and OPEC, in addition to being a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council.