User:Tarafa15/MBS Vision 2030

Vision 2030
Prince Mohammed bin Salman took the leadership in the restructuring of Saudi Arabia's economy, which he officially announced in April 2016 when he introduced Vision 2030, the country's strategic orientation for the next 15 years. Vision 2030 plans to reform Saudi's economy towards a more diversified and privatized structure. It details goals and measures in various fields, from developing non-oil revenues and privatization of the economy to e-government and sustainable development.

At the inaugural Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in October 2017, bin Salman announced plans for the creation of Neom, a $500 billion economic zone to cover an area of 26,000 square kilometres on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, extending into Jordan and Egypt. Neom aims to attract investment in sectors including renewable energy, biotechnology, robotics and advanced manufacturing. The announcement followed plans to develop a 34,000 square kilometre area across a lagoon of 50 islands on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coastline into a luxury tourism destination with laws on a par with international standards. In a further effort to boost the tourism industry, in November 2017 it was announced that Saudi Arabia would start issuing tourist visas for foreigners, beginning in 2018.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman's biggest bet was his plan to restore the Saudi kingdom's dominance in global oil markets by driving the new competition into bankruptcy, by keeping the oil price low enough for a long enough period. Saudi Arabia persuaded OPEC to do the same. A few small players went bankrupt, but American frackers only shut down their less-profitable operations temporarily, and waited for oil prices to go up again. Saudi Arabia, which had been spending $100 billion a year to keep services and subsidies going, had to admit defeat in November 2016. It then cut production significantly and asked its OPEC partners to do the same.

In the last week of September 2018, Mohammed bin Salman inaugurated the much-awaited $6.7bn high-speed railway line connecting Mecca and Medina, two holiest cities of Islam. The Haramain Express is 450km line travelling up to 300km/h that can transport around 60 million passengers annually. The commercial operations of the railway will begin from 1 October 2018.

In October 2018, Mohammed bin Salman announced that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia’s assets were approaching $400 billion and would pass $600 billion by 2020.

A project to build Saudi Arabia’s first nuclear reactor was announced by bin Salman in November 2018. The kingdom aims to build 16 nuclear facilities over the next 20 years. Efforts to diversify the Saudi energy sector also include wind and solar, including a 1.8 gigawatt solar plant announced in the same month as part of a long term project in partnership with SoftBank.