ABSTRACT
This article will attempt to make a broad assessment of the direction of economic development in Saudi Arabia, and highlight some areas of growing political and social stress. 1 Prior to 1970, development was financially and geographically limited, the result of Saudi Arabia’s limited oil revenues and the physical size of the country. Extensive economic development is recent in origin and has been effected at a rapid pace. Partly as a result of which rapidity of development, it has been primarily the urban populations which have participated in and experienced the effects of it. About half the national population has been bypassed by it, remaining, for a range of social and economic reasons, locked into the rural economy. Productivity in this sector is low, but cash incomes, derived from a miscellany of sources, are comparatively high — high enough to persuade rural Saudis that their self-ordered existence on farms is preferable to the trauma of urban life.
