There is a huge positive news for all Gulf states as there has been off recent huge recovery as witnessed in the Crude Oil rates in pre-pandemic level as it improved back to be at $60-65 per barrel thus, bringing a huge relief from the otherwise a huge traumatic preceding year.
Post a hugely turbulent preceding year, for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) which witnessed huge oil rates to drastically fall from around a healthy $60 per barrel to just $20 within the closure of 2019 as well as overall hotel inhabitants to plummet around 80 percent to just around 23 percent as arise due to travel related restrictions as well as subsequent lockdowns that casted heavy toll in the fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic circumstance, as the overview for 2021 got dramatically enhanced.
However, it will not be till next year in 2022 that life proceeds to achieve anything like the normality.
Similarly, the extensive and rapid roll-out of numerous anti-Covid-19 vaccines collected with the gathering of pent-up, unspent currency equilibriums in the advanced economies point to a dynamic recovery in travel, tourism and the hospitality sector in the GCC during the second half of 2021.
These sectors are specifically significant for the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and will be advanced by Expo 2020 to be held in Dubai from October 2021 to March 2022 and by the FIFA World Cup to be held in Qatar in November and December 2022.
The turn-around will be power-driven both by a stimulation in revenues from hydrocarbons as well as by the re-opening of the travel, hospitality and marketable sectors.
However, fiscal equilibriums in all the GCC states are projected to endure deeply in the red as administrations gradually diminish their sustenance to core sectors on the spending side while oil revenues improve slowly – in line with the gradual increase in oil production — to pre-pandemic levels over the year.
According to these estimates, Kuwait and Oman will still be undergoing double-digit budget deficits of 15.6 percent and 11.7 percent of GDP in 2021.
After a year of sharp economic deteriorations across the territory in 2020, economists polled by Bloomberg assume real GDP in all the Gulf states to reappear to positive progress rates in 2021, ranging from 3.1 percent evolution in Bahrain to 1.7 percent in Oman.
In disparity to the weak, sub-par recoveries practiced after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09, the immensely diverse nature and scale of the economic impetus deployed to deal with the pandemic in 2020 means that the projections of a dynamic recovery in 2021 and 2022 are far more secure.
Even so, it will possibly take another 18-24 months previously broad measures of income and output such as GDP in the GCC economies recover to their pre-crisis peaks.
