Can Saudi Arabia move beyond oil?
episodePreviously titled “Saudi Arabia: The Vision 2030 test” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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What is Vision 2030 and its significance for Saudi Arabia?
Hello and welcome to Business Daily on BBC World Service. I'm Samir Hashmi in Riyadh. Today we are looking at the sweeping economic changes the kingdom has undergone since the launch of Vision 2030 nearly a decade ago. A reform drive aimed at reducing its dependence on oil.
Really Vision 2030 was a strategy by the Crown Prince to put his chips on many numbers with the idea that if a few numbers worked that would diversify the economy.
Some of those bets are now beginning to pay off, with a handful of sectors emerging as meaningful contributors to non-oil revenues.
Our target is 10% by 2030, which means we need to double the 5% in the next five years.
But those gains are now being tested as the Iran war adds a new layer of risk.
I think we do have to prepare for a perhaps extended period of instability, unresolved sort of warm or lukewarm conflict within the region. So that makes it hard for everybody.
That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC.
A young Saudi royal being welcomed on the world stage. It's August 2015. Mohammed bin Salman has been appointed Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia at the age of 30. And this is one of his first overseas visits.
Music
He's walking the red carpet in Amman, welcomed by Jordan's King Abdullah, a military band playing, royal guards standing to attention. At the time, few outside the region knew much about him. Within a few years, this young prince would become crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the kingdom's de facto ruler. By the time he became Crown Prince in 2017, he had already pitched a confident economic vision for Saudi Arabia, known as Vision 2030, an ambitious plan to transform the country's economy. In a television interview, he explained what he saw as Saudi Arabia's core economic problem. This is very dangerous. We have a state of oil addiction.
We have a case of addiction to oil in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on the part of everyone. That issue is serious. It disrupted the development of many sectors in the past years. Oil should be treated as an investment, nothing more, nothing less.
The diagnosis became the foundation of Vision 2030, an economic strategy to reduce Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil and reshape Saudi society itself. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter. When Vision 2030 was announced nearly a decade ago, oil accounted for nearly half of the economy. Since then, the kingdom has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into new sectors, from entertainment and tourism to sports and mining, as well as some of the world's most ambitious infrastructure projects. Concerts, cinemas and global sporting events, once unthinkable, are now routine. Women, who once faced tight social and economic restrictions, are now driving, working and visible across public life.
Saudi female labor force participation has more than doubled over the past decade, but only around a third of working-age women are currently active in the labor market. The non-oil economy has expanded sharply, but oil remains the backbone of the economy and the main source of funding for Vision 2030 itself. And despite progress on several fronts, the government has faced major challenges, including delays and scaling back of NEOM, the trillion-dollar futuristic region in the desert that once sat at the heart of the diversification drive. So how should Vision 2030 be judged so far?
Well, I think people have ignored a lot of the sort of unglamorous but substantive work that has been done.
Ali Shahabi is a Saudi analyst and a commentator and a member of NEOM's advisory board.
First of all, the empowerment of women and the increase in women's participation in the workforce from 16% to 36%. And that was supposed to happen by 2030.
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