Six oil abundant Gulf Countries, Cursed of Blessed?

An empirical analysis has been done to observe the effects that the sector growth has in the countries that are part of the Gulf Cooperation Council on regional and individual economic growth. These countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. When running a panel data model with fixed effects, it appears that for most countries economic diversification is not improving over time. Policy implementations and regional efforts do not provide enough support to drive growth in all sectors. The manufacturing sector is hardly of influence to economic growth for almost all countries. For half of the countries, the oil sector is still the main driver of economic growth. The other half has a services sector with a strong influence on economic growth. Finally it appears that tourism is a sector that is strong in all countries except Saudi Arabia, whose service sector is led by the transport sector.