The Saudi government declared a few weeks ago that it was reassessing Vision 2030 projects, postponing some and reducing the goals of others. These remarks were made by a number of officials, including Mohammed Al-Jadaan, the finance minister of Saudi Arabia.
For its part, the British Financial Times newspaper reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has started to examine the projects put forth by the Saudi Crown Prince in Vision 2030 more realistically for a number of reasons. The primary one is that these projects have failed to draw in foreign investors and tourists, and the second is that the Kingdom is no longer able to finance these projects due to the country’s financial crisis. Due to significant spending on vision projects that had no discernible economic impact on the state budget, there was a budget deficit that resulted in these projects.
It is noteworthy that the Crown Prince stated in 2017 that the sky was the limit when it came to his plan, represented by Vision 2030. However, since then, he has not completed implementing a single project from his vision, and these projects have not resulted in a significant inflow of foreign investment. Instead, he has been left standing in the middle of the road with his projects, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars because the Kingdom’s budget cannot finish the projects. It is well known that standing in the middle of the road is the graveyard of major projects. Experts and economists warned him about this, but he chose to listen only to himself, and now the state is paying the price for his disillusionment.
Despite all the economic benefits the Saudi government has touted for businesses looking to invest in Saudi Arabia, the newspaper attributed the Kingdom’s leaders’ rethinking of Bin Salman’s projects to the significantly lower than anticipated foreign investment in the projects put forth by the Saudi Crown Prince. Foreign investment is the best option for these kinds of projects if the state budget is not responsible for funding and spending them.
The Line project was supposed to stretch for 170 km and eventually house 1.5 million people, but project officials recently informed visitors that they are giving priority to the first unit, which will be much shorter and include a small fraction of that number. After the Saudi authorities announced they had failed to achieve their goal in The Line project, the newspaper based its report on the reduction of their goals in NEOM projects.
Additionally, the Saudi government declared that it had lowered its goal to just 10 million residents in Riyadh by 2030 after failing to double the city’s population to 15 million.
According to unnamed sources, the Saudi Crown Prince feels that he must now get ready for crucial discussions about his NEOM projects and reevaluate which ones, despite the difficulty of doing so for himself in the eyes of the public, should be advanced and which should be shelved because the public opinion does not agree with his economic theses from 2017. Will MBS be humble and accept reality, or will he be haughty and lead the kingdom to further misfortune and mounting debt?
