The private sector and reform in the Gulf Cooperation Council

As there is very little recent research on the private sector’s role in reforms in the GCC, the proposed paper is to some extent a general overview of the issue which will by necessity be broad and survey-like. In its second half, however, it will also develop a specific and new political economy argument about the role of rentier fiscal mechanisms in linking and juxtaposing the three political poles of state, business, and society at large. This argument will help to make sense of many of the more descriptive findings in the paper’s first half. In its conclusion, the paper aims at putting Gulf business in broader comparative perspective and will try to fathom whether there is something like a GCC-specific “variety of capitalism”. Business in economic development and policy-making. This section will provide an overview of GCC private sectors’ contributions to national accounts, capital formation and employment, drawing on descriptive time series data to assess to which extent it has matured as a capitalist class since the 1970s. Depending on the length of the time series, I might conduct cointegration tests on the state spending elasticity of growth in different sectors to measure to which extent the sensitivity of business to (different types of) state spending has declined, i.e. to which extent it is on a more autonomous growth path...