Qatar: Selected Issues

IMF Staff Country Reports, June 3, 2019

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Diversification is important for a large commodity exporter like Qatar: it helps manage temporary shocks and prepare for sweeping changes to the economic setting.
Qatar’s large financial holdings can help diversify revenues.
Further diversification is important to help Qatar manage temporary shocks and prepare for far-reaching shifts to the economic context.

Both structural reforms to improve the business environment and sector-specific policies can support diversification of activity and exports.
Sector-specific policies should build on existing economic strengths in areas with room for exports and innovation.
Emphasis should be placed on developing expertise in specific clusters.
Export markets and competition provide crucial mechanisms to ensure discipline and should be deliberately used to hold recipients of support accountable.
Well-targeted, structured, and sequenced policies to encourage specific sectors can play a role in diversifying Qatar’s economy.
Policies to encourage specific sectors have resulted in little more than inefficient import substitution in many countries; avoiding this outcome requires discipline: support should be withdrawn in the absence of progress.

Subject: Budget planning and preparation, Expenditure, Exports, Fiscal policy, Fiscal rules, International trade, Public financial management (PFM)
Keywords: Budget planning and preparation, CR, expenditures decision, Exports, exposure to oil, Fiscal rules, Global, government spending, hydrocarbon price, hydrocarbon reserve, IMF export diversification, ISCR, medium-expenditure framework, price, Qatar, Qatar's economy, Qatar's Second National Development Strategy

Qatar: Selected Issues; IMF Country Report No. 19/147; April 29, 2019
- Qatar: Selected Issues; IMF Country Report No. 19/147; April 29, 2019 (Markdown version)
- Qatar: Selected Issues; IMF Country Report No. 19/147; April 29, 2019 (PDF)