Good morning,
Today’s video revolves around the Gulf Cooperation Council and the benefits its citizens draw by virtue of being a part of their respective nations. This started out as a specific deep dive into Saudi benefits packages, but I thought it wise to provide something of a broad, regional overview.
In today’s newsletter I want to cover some things that got cut or deserve elaboration from the video.
Lesser Benefits: The idea was mentioned that non-citizen residents recieve benefits, but nothing equal to that of a citizen. The primary candidate in my mind was the oil subsidy. Virtually everyone must drive, and so you may see some benefits as a non-citizeen at the gas pump. Every Emirate of the UAE is different, as is every Gulf nation, yet in broad strokes there is a prefernce towards catering to citizens first.
If you are from Western Europe or North America, you may have perks from your company like a subsidized American-style home, a company car or expense account, tax free income, et cetera. That is not coming from the state.
Stratified Society:
People from outside of the region sometimes act as if there is no poverty, as if because these states “skip” the accountability step of democracies that they can focus entirely on making citizen’s lives as comfortable as possible. This is a nice thought, but not realistic. Citizens do get benefits, they get a lot of support, but material wealth and access remain a factor of daily life.
Women’s Education; This section could have been a lot longer, and a lot more indepth. The data on women’s entrance into colleges exists, and there were in the past restrictions on women’s education in certain fields, but it is unclear if that remain true. Gender segregation, at least in Saudi Arabia, is still very much a thing.
I will seek to do better going forward on clarity. While there is much social hardship for women in the Gulf, no doubt, educattion in broad strokes seems accessible to all. In many Gulf countries women have a higher percentage of university enrollment than men. I may
Studying Abroad: Kuwait has a program to help Kuwaiti students go abroad for education, but it was unclear during research what the exact requirements were. These study abroad programs could in and of themselves be a video.
In 2018, the Saudi King awarded money to Saudis studying abroad whether on government support or not. Something tells me gender has little to do with it.
Benefits Left Out; Kuwait has a special marriage benefit in the form of a long term, zero interest loan to Kuwaiti men that marry Kuwaiti women.
Wrap Up & Next Steps: Going forward, I am going to try and branch out to make more content not solely focussed in on America. While this particular video is much more of an overview than I would’ve liked, I’m proud of how it turned out.
This April I hope to make more than a few videos regarding my personal experiences with life in the United States, urbanism, and government systems as we saw today. I will try to release more written content here going forward exclusive to the platform, so stay tuned!
If you would like to read more about this topic, I will leave these as futther reading:
An academic paper on Springer (if yoo don’t have access you may be able to find this on JSTOR, but I am unsure. The abstract looked promising)
A Foreign Policy article from 2017
A UN Report on Welfare in Bahrain
A Reddit thread about benefits in Kuwait
Until Next Time