Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia is by far the largest country of the GCC in terms of surface; it also owns almost 16% of the world’s petroleum reserves, possessing 268.350 billion barrels of proved reserves of crude oil and 290.811 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2014, ranking the country as the largest energy-exporter state. Thus, its economy is clearly dependent on oil resources. Despite its energy abundance, Saudi Arabia has the lowest income per capita of the GCC14. Consequently the main problems pointed out by the national administration are youth unemployment, low living standards and income disparities within the local population. However, this does not mean that the country has not undertaken some economic reforms to lower its dependency on the energy sector. Indeed, the Ministry of Economic and planning (MoEP) promoted during the 2000’s several policies to push the privatization process. The private sector’s contribution to the non-hydrocarbon GDP thus increased from 2000 to 2011 (cf. Figure 2). Saudi Arabia is also the second most diversified economy of the GCC (cf. Figure 1). With its new long-term strategy released in 2004, Saudi Arabia aims at enlarging further the role of the private sector, in order to finally shift from an allocative to a productive state. More precisely, they are making considerable efforts to improve the business framework and reach a business-friendly environment to attract more FDI. Reinforcing the regional and global integration of the country is a related objective, the Kingdom having applied to become an official member of the WTO in 2005. The national development plan set a target of $500 billion investment, mainly “to attract FDI in the field of high technology (…), and to encourage the private sector to move towards knowledge- based and high value-added production and services activities”15 before 2024. The priorities remain « to raise the national economy to the level of advanced economies, which implies doubling the per capita income between 2004 and 2024, creating jobs for the fast- growing and thus young population, increasing the role of non-oil production in the economy and reducing the share of oil and gas in total exports from 72% to 37% during the plan period