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That’s not true, the Saudis do very well for themselves. The entire citizen population is given massive handouts, and it seems to be working out okay. Corrupti
by mruts 7y ago
That’s not true, the Saudis do very well for themselves. The entire citizen population is given massive handouts, and it seems to be working out okay. Corruption isn’t very bad, at least compared to other oil states.
Also Kuwait is doing good as well, and they have a retarded amount of oil.
But, in general, I agree that it often hurts instead of helps. But select countries like the US, Norway, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia have become very prosperous from natural resources and nothing terrible has happened because of it.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago>the Saudis do very well for themselves. The entire citizen population is given massive handouts, Have you ever been to Riyadh and seen the poor state of housing, the laughable state of repair of motor vehicles, the constant complaints about the state of the education and health systems? Perhaps they are given massive handouts but it doesn't seem to be translating into functioning infrastructure.
- umeshunni 7y agoI think the difference is potentially that the Gulf countries - Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar etc - benefitted from being able to develop their economies and infrastructure and establish large social welfare systems in the 70s and 80s while their populations were small and oil prices and income were very high. Here's a chart that shows Saudi per capita income from the 70s: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=saunygdppcapkd&v=201907041342a1&d1=19190101&d2=20191231&h=300&w=600 https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=saunygdppcapk... You can see that their per capita collapsed in the 80s along with oil prices. The royal families in those countries are incredibly corrupt by modern standards, but they have established a system that keeps everyone outside that circle in line with subsidies, religion and threats of imprisonment.