by maildunais | 25 Feb 2021 | Omar Al-Ubaydli
POLICY BRIEF25 February 2021Many GCC governments have established or are in the process of establishing behavioural economics (“nudge”) units as an additional instrument of policymaking, with the support of Western experts. With sustainability considerations becoming more central in the policy development process, nudging has a key role to play in effectively changing citizen behaviour. Yet local specificities mean that replicating models which have worked abroad is fraught with risk: social habits among GCC citizens can result in nudge campaigns having the opposite effects to the ones intended. In this context, it is essential to leverage local expertise to ensure campaigns are effectively delivered and government efficiency is maximized.
by maildunais | 28 Sep 2020 | Steffen Hertog
POLICY BRIEF28 September 2020A growing number of countries globally are considering and sometimes experimenting with Universal Basic Income (UBI), as an instrument for wealth distribution and social equity. GCC states could be the ideal testing ground for new distributional policies such as UBI which could reduce the fiscal burden of an over-extended public sector workforce while maintaining the social contract.
by maildunais | 7 Aug 2020 | Steffen Hertog
POLICY BRIEF7 August 2020The GCC pursues economic diversification with real assets — mature bureaucracies, strong infrastructure, ample capital — yet faces constraints found nowhere else, and often misread by policy-makers and their advisors. The region’s unusually generous social contract, with roughly 70 percent of citizens’ jobs in government, has pushed national wages well above productivity and left the tradables sector uncompetitive. Conventional industrialisation on cheap labour is closed off; leapfrogging into advanced production is hard and rarely achieved. There is no blueprint, and the international benchmarking consultants favour is of limited relevance. Diversification will instead demand cautious experimentation and a gradual, politically delicate reformulation of the social contract — reducing distortions while preserving the living standards citizens have come to expect. The fiscal runway to manage that transition is real but, at current oil prices, narrowing.
