An oil-producing country is not necessarily a rich country. This is what the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohamed Bin Salman said in substance in an interview with the Saudi channel Al Arabiya, broadcast last Wednesday.
To illustrate his point, he cited Algeria as an example of an oil-producing country, distinguishing between this qualification and that of a “rich country ” from which he also excludes Saudi Arabia from this definition.
“We are an oil country, not a rich country. We are an oil country”, affirms the crown prince in an interview granted to the Saudi television channel Al Arabiya, whose remarks were reported by the site Arab News.
“ Iraq is an oil-producing country, as is Algeria. Are they rich countries? A country is rich in relation to economic income or income in relation to the size of the population, ”argues Mohamed Ben Salmane.
The Crown Prince recalls that Saudi Arabia, which derives most of its foreign exchange earnings from the sale of oil, was a rich country in the 1970s and 1980s when it “had a smaller population and a lot of oil”. “But now we are 20 million and we are growing rapidly,” said the crown prince.
“If we do not maintain our savings and distribute our tools every day, we will be transformed into a poorer country, but we must break this impasse,” advocates MBS.
“One of my first priorities is to have stable, solid, sustainable or not exhausting funding, otherwise we will be in a rather difficult situation where we will not be able to create growth,” recommends Ben Salmane.
A gigantic investment plan
On March 31, the Crown Prince announced an investment plan of 3.2 trillion dollars to stimulate the private sector as part of his Vision 2020 project, which he launched, which focuses in particular on tourism and new towns, to reduce his country’s dependence on oil.
If Saudi Arabia has decided to make colossal investments to diversify its economy, this is not the case for Algeria, which did not take advantage of the oil chief of the 2000s to definitively reform its economy.
In a context of a sharp drop in its foreign exchange income, Algeria has not launched any large-scale investment plan to develop the private sector, while it is struggling to diversify its economy heavily dependent on hydrocarbons which represent 98%. of its foreign exchange earnings.
The efforts made by the government to develop non-hydrocarbon exports come up against the finicky bureaucracy of the administration and exchange regulations deemed “repressive” by exporters.
