Saudi recasting reform plan: Reports

Manama : Saudi Arabia is considering overhauling its government and economy by 2020, extending the timeline of some targets and removing others entirely, various news agencies reported yesterday.

The new version of the National Transformation Program (NTP) launched over a year ago will be more focused and have clear governance, reports said. 

The revamped programme, referred to as NTP 2.0, won’t change key fiscal or energy-related targets, but it will accommodate what is required to match it with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s broader Saudi Vision 2030, reports said.

“This is probably a natural development in the sense that the NTP and the Vision were not developed in complete coordination,” said Graham Griffiths, a senior analyst for Control Risks in Dubai as quoted by news agency Bloomberg.

 “There is a bit of cause for concern in the fact that they rushed this out in the first place, and now they’re having to redo it.”

The original NTP was designed to overhaul the Saudi bureaucracy as the world’s largest oil exporter grappled with low crude prices, and set targets for each ministry to achieve by 2020. But it was overshadowed by the prince’s Vision 2030, a broader blueprint for life after oil that calls for selling shares in state oil company Saudi Aramco and creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Neither is affected by the NTP redraft.

While Vision 2030 was announced first in April 2016, NTP had already been in development and was first mentioned in local media the previous December -- well before any public discussion of the prince’s grand plan. That ultimately meant that the NTP had to be linked to Vision 2030 “in reverse,” according to the document.

The NTP later became one of 12 programmes within Vision 2030 and as a result, many of the government agencies that were originally part of the programme are no longer directly involved, including the energy, finance and housing ministries.

Many of the programme’s original targets have also been farmed out to other initiatives. Steps to balance the budget by 2020 now come under the auspices of the Fiscal Balance Program announced in December. The revamped NTP will still run to 2020, but its implementation will also involve developing targets for 2025 and 2030, the document said, without elaborating.

Goals for the programme include improving the public sector productivity, boosting women’s participation in the workforce and developing tourism, according to the document. 

The first NTP also had targets for many of the areas, including boosting the participation rate of women in the labour force to 28 per cent. It’s unclear if they will be changed.