The Sustainability of GCC Development under the New Global Oil Order

This paper reviews the development experiences of the six GCC countries, which managed to avoid the explicit consequences of the resource curse. This seems to defy the prediction of the received literature for resource endowed societies that lack political institutions for ensuring inclusiveness and accountability in managing the resource rents. We subscribe to the argument that the unusually high rents per capita of the scale available for the GCC seems to have been associated with a developmental, if non-democratic, political equilibrium. However, the dependence of the GCC political set and consequently its development model, on the availability of exorbitantly high rents per capita, is likely to complicate the prospects for future sustainability, particularly under the new emerging ‘global oil order’, which is expected to be characterized by an eventual low oil price equilibrium.