‘Qatar Continues To Focus on Economic Diversification’

Doha, Qatar: Qatar is focusing on its journey towards economic diversification. The four key sectors the country is going to be focusing on are logistics, ICT, manufacturing, and tourism, said Minister of Finance H E Ali Ahmed Al Kuwari addressing the Qatar Economic Forum 2024, yesterday.

Leading policymakers shared how they are guiding the region towards a vision of sustainable and inclusive growth, powered by vibrant and diversified economies during a panel discussion entitled ‘Reshaping Middle East Economies’. The session discussed what the countries in the GCC can do for this acceleration to keep going with a view of working towards more inclusive, sustainable growth.

Minister of Finance touched on several fundamental topics, including Qatar's macro-outlook, regional direction (integrations vs. fragmentation), economic vision, plans beyond 2030. He highlighted the ambitious goals set out by the Third National Development Strategy (NDS3), which aims to achieve sustainable economic growth by increasing non-oil growth to 4% annually. Minister Al Kuwari emphasised the crucial role played by this vision phase in achieving this goal, stating that "Through NDS3, the goal is to promote sustainable economic growth, ensuring competitiveness amid a dynamic global environment."

Speaking during a session during the fourth edition of the Qatar Economic Forum under the theme “A World Remade: Navigating the Year of Uncertainty, Minister of Finance highlighted the Qatar National Vision 2030 which has been the economic backbone for the trajectory of Qatari economy and sectors that are going to be driving growth.

Minister Al Kuwari said, “We are embarking in the last phase of our journey toward 2030 vision. When we made the vision there were three phases, the first phase focused on creating national champions – the Qatar Investment Authority, QNB, Ooredoo which helped us to build the brand for the country. In second phase, we invested more than QR300bn in state-of-the-art infrastructure for the country and we had a big event FIFA 2022. So much of our infrastructure was helped to be accelerated for the world cup event.”

“Beyond 2022 we continued our journey and focused more about economic diversification, enabling the private sector about changing the policies and ease of  doing business, focusing on key sectors and balancing between development of human capital, health, education, technology, environment and sustainability.”

 “The four key sectors we are re going to be focusing on are logistics, ICT, manufacturing, and tourism. We are going to be using enabling sector, for example financial sector is going to be one of the strong enabler to achieve these goals,” he added.

Minister of Finance further stated, “Our target is to grow non-hydrocarbon by 4 percent a year for next six years until 2030. 

The energy sector is performing very well and we have announced big expansion in our LNG production. We are going to be increasing Qatar’s LNG production by 85 percent in a phased manner by 2030 and are going to reaching 142 million tonnes per annum. 

We believe LNG will be transit energy for a long time and this is going to help us bring in fund that is going to be invested in our vision 2030 and future generation.” Speaking about Saudi Vision 2030, Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia H E Mohammed Aljadaan said, the world economy is going through very serious challenges and we are part of that. “Vision 2030 is transforming the whole nation to make sure that we are a diversified and sustainable economy. This is a mission that GCC is going through and marching towards proper sustainable diversified economy that enables the private sector and utilises our demography of young population who are technology savvy who can be investor ready leaders of the future.” 

Chairman of IsDB Group H E Dr. Muhammad Sulaiman Al Jasser explained how important it is for the countries of the region to continue with this diversification push and what Qatar and Saudi Arabia is doing can serve as a template. He stated that the GCC is seen as one block that has cohesive and complementary policies to move forward and be a beacon of economic growth and development not only for the region but beyond.