Saudi Arabia and the WTO

Abstract

In the new millennium, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has set itself the objective of reducing the economy's vulnerability and heavy dependence on oil market fortunes, and has opted for decentralized, private market-based economic activities (Auty, 2001). The Kingdom aims to achieve this through different approaches. A strategic decision was made by the Kingdom to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) to enable a bigger Saudi world market share and this was achieved in December 2005. Other strategic options which will be examined in the following chapter involved the initiation of domestic privatization programmes of core government services and using foreign direct investment (FDI) to foster technology transfer and domestic economic stimulus (Najem and Hetherington, 2003).