Reforming the Gulf Rentier State: From Patronage to Cash Grants?

This Kuwait Programme event will be a discussion about Dr Steffen Hertog’s recent research on cash grants in Kuwait. H. E. Yousef Al-Ebraheem will be acting as a discussant.

View Steffen Hertog's PowerPoint presentation here.

GCC countries share their national wealth with citizens through public employment and subsidies, policies that are inefficient, inequitable, economically distortive and fiscally unsustainable. This talk discusses how unconditional cash grants for adult nationals could replace government jobs and subsidies. It will draw on Dr Steffen Hertog’s recent research that investigates how cash grants could be financed, what their distributional consequences would be, and how they could be combined with other welfare reforms to minimize distortions and maximize political feasibility and fiscal sustainability. While the quantitative illustrations of the proposed reforms will draw on the Kuwaiti case, the general feasibility of cash grant policies will be discussed for all GCC monarchies.

Dr Steffen Hertog is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He joined the Government Department in 2010 as a lecturer. He was previously Kuwait Professor at Sciences Po Paris, lecturer in political economy at the University of Durham and post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University. He holds an MA from the University of Bonn, an MSc from the School of Oriental and African Studies and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

H.E. Yousef Al-Ebraheem is a member of the board of directors of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC, the Chairman of Investcorp and a member of the board of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. He has served as Kuwait’s Minister of Finance, Minister of Planning, and Minister of State for Administrative Development Affairs. Prior to that he was the Minister of Education and Higher Education. Al-Ebraheem has served as the Dean of the School of Business at Kuwait University. Prior to that he held the post of Cultural Counselor/Director at the Cultural Division of the Embassy of the State of Kuwait in Washington, DC. He has a PhD in economics from Claremont Graduate University. He has authored a number of publications, reports, research papers, and books.

Dr Courtney Freer is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre. Her work focuses on the domestic politics of the Gulf states, particularly the roles played by Islamism and tribalism. Her book Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies, based on her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford and published by Oxford University Press in 2018, examines the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood groups in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

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