ABSTRACT
While the commercial and tribal elite sought domination in revenue – producing economic development, infrastructure and human resource development were left largely to technocrats and central government control, although this was an area in which the government was able to incorporate tribal representation. Education and health, transportation and communication, social welfare and culture provided lucrative construction contracts for schools, hospitals, roads, airports, ports, and other facilities: in the long run, however, they were expensive to operate and did not generate profits. This freed the government to exercise its control over the state and establish a balance in its dealings with the commercial/tribal elite for influence with the population. Not surprisingly this was also the sector that government compromised whenever caught between the economic demands of the military, the sultan’s priority, and the economic demands of the commercial elite for financial and human resources. Nowhere was this problem more evident that in the issue of Omanization, where the demands for more profit, through the availability of cheap labor and the glory of the military, placed great pressure on the goal of economic nationalization.
