Page 206 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

188 Dubai & Co.

Figure 7.1 Saudi GDP per capita spiked and surpassed the United States’
in the 1970s (Source: United Nations)

up industrial infrastructure, educational infrastructure, and the
commercial sector through centuries of institution building. This
has not been the case in the Gulf, where wealth came quickly but
institutions were scarce. GCC states were therefore faced with a
peculiar situation: prosperity without infrastructure. Elsewhere,
institutions preceded wealth; in the Gulf the sequence was largely
reversed.
Figure 7.2 illustrates the phenomenon by which GCC
economies found themselves needing to “backfill” institutional
development to match their level of prosperity.
Without the benefit of sustained institutional development,
GCC states have faced an imperative to build institutions in the
wake of their abrupt rise to prosperity. In essence, they have needed
to backfill, or catch up on, infrastructure development in order to be
on a par with other countries at similar levels of wealth. 2
The human capital implications of this backfill imperative
have been profound. GCC government and private-sector leaders