Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and his ruling gang continue to promote Vision 2030 and its role in developing the economy in the Kingdom and achieving the greatest economic growth in the country. However, the reality faced by the Saudi people is unquestionably that MBS's vision is a failure, and his economic figures are just dreams and illusions that have not materialized.
The media disinformation campaign that MBS ran to mislead the public did not contribute to keeping the budget safe from ongoing deficits. The Saudi media, on the other hand, supported MBS's regime by claiming that the budget had a surplus.
The Ministry of Finance stated in its yearly report that the Kingdom's 2023 budget deficit was roughly one billion riyals. This was after the budget's revenues totaled 1.193 trillion riyals and its expenses exceeded 1.275 trillion riyals. At around 1.030 trillion riyals, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's public debt has surpassed an unexpected threshold.
Though MBS's media campaign promoted the idea of achieving an average surplus of 10 billion riyals in 2023, the truth exposed their falsehoods and demonstrated that such a surplus was not achievable.
Well-informed sources claim that the budget deficit figure released by the Saudi Ministry of Finance is 1.5 times higher than these figures and is therefore inaccurate.
Economists stated: The budget has been in deficit for the last six years, from 2016 to 2021, under MBS's administration, exposing and demonstrating the failure of his economic vision. The high demand for oil during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, however, led to a surplus in 2022. This indicates that the MBS vision was not realized, and the Kingdom's budget did not have a substantial surplus.
For instance, compared to 226.8 billion riyals for the same period in 2022, taxes in the first nine months of this year totaled 277.9 billion riyals, or nearly a third of revenues.
