أثر الدعم الحكومي على النمو الاقتصادي في المملكة العربية السعودية

Abstract EN

The government of the Kingdom has provided during the last few decades different forms of support and assistance to various economic sectors.

These sectors have received different forms of supports according to the phases of the economic development and the priorities of the comprehensive development plans.

This study aimed to analyze the impact of the government support on the economic growth in the non-oil sector.

To analyze the impact of the government support, a broader neoclassical production function has been used including besides the capital and labor variables the government subsidizes, soft government loans, government expenditure minus subsidizes, and the money supply (M3).

The econometric results showed the significance of all variables included in the model except the labor force and indicated that both government subsidizes and soft loans have a significant and weak impact on the economic growth.

The elasticity of the government soft loans (0.07) is higher than the elasticity of the non-refundable government subsidizes (0.032).

The study concluded that the impacts of support policies applied by the Kingdom to the economic growth were limitative.

This shows that the government support policy has social impacts that might exceed its limited economic objectives.