According to a recent financial report, the surplus in the Kingdom’s budget for the current year may reach SR191 billion, and the economy could register a 6.5 percent growth.
As far as I know, this would be the highest growth rate Saudi Arabia would achieve in several years. The Kingdom could also maintain an economic growth rate between 5 percent and 7 percent over the next five years.
What does all this mean? It means that if we succeeded in curbing the rising population by achieving a population growth rate of less than 3 percent, and at the same time managing to contain inflation to a reasonable level, we could very well witness a second boom era like the one the Kingdom experienced during the late seventies and early nineties of the last century.
This time let us hope the second boom era would be free of the shortcomings and failures that accompanied the first one.
This is not an impossible achievement. People learn from their past experiences, and by now we should have learned the lessons very well.
Many vital infrastructure projects, whose feasibility studies have long been completed, remain on hold for lack of funds. These include new airports and highways and expanding existing ones; health and education projects; sports facilities including the construction of international stadia in Jeddah, Taif, Abha and Buraidah for these cities to be able to host the Olympics and other international events.
A surplus in the budget would also help slim down the inflated civil service by encouraging government employees to opt for early retirement.
The money must also be used to settle the public debt to create more liquidity. This extra money has to be carefully managed so as to avoid a crash of the stock market or an unjustified hike in real estate prices.
The solution lies in privatizing the state-owned enterprises and converting family business into shareholder companies.
