John Sfakianakis, Middle East director at Ashmore Group, also commented on Saudi Arabia’s economic achievements.

He said: “Since the middle of the last century, our thinking as development economists has been dominated by the “dualism” of developing economies. That is, the existence of a backward sector (agriculture) with surplus low-productivity low-wage labor on the one hand, and on the other hand a modern sector (Manufacturing or raw material extraction) characterized by higher-productivity higher-wage labor. Development then was seen as the process of moving the economy and the labor force from one dominated by the backward sector to one dominated by the more productive modern sector, which would result in higher value added and higher living standards.

Regardless of the metric one uses to measure development performance in Saudi Arabia, achievements have been truly impressive since the 1970s and one cannot but agree that the country is light-years more advanced and competitive today than it was then.

Let me give some examples:

l From a life expectancy at birth of 53 years in 1970 to 75 years today;

l From a 31.5 percent literacy rate in 1970 to 94.3 percent in 2013;

l From 9,000 hospital beds in 1970 to over 64 thousand in 2013;

l From 8,000 km of inter-city paved roads in the 1969 to over 64,000 km in 2013;

l From only $5.6 billion in nonoil exports in 1999 to over $54 billion in 2013.

These are enormous achievements that Saudi Arabia should be very proud to have made.