ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed the resurgence of official development assistance (ODA) from the Gulf states. Bilateral aid contributions from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have leapt from slightly more than US$400 million in 1999 to nearly US$6 billion a decade later. In doing so, the Arab Gulf is beginning to reclaim its position, which it had gradually given up throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as a major humanitarian and development financier. Consider for instance that, in 1978, the KSA, Kuwait and the UAE contributed funds equivalent to 40.3 per cent of that provided by the then 18 ‘traditional’ donors comprising the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Furthermore, in 1980, ODA provided by the KSA was over three times the value of aid given globally by the United Kingdom (Porter 1986: 46). 1 However, the following two decades saw a significant decline in Gulf state financing in both relative and real terms, whereas contributions from the DAC continued to grow (Haldane 1990). By 1999, KSA, Kuwait and the UAE – three of the most significant Gulf state donor countries – were providing barely half a per cent of the world’s humanitarian and development assistance (see Figure 15.1). OECD-DAC and Gulf state ODA (1970–2008) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203813218/4145280c-3d64-41d5-8fc4-6b542ef689b1/content/fig15_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: OECD ‘Stats’, Query Wizard on International Development Statistics, at: https://stats.oecd.org/qwids/.
