Persian Gulf Countries Are Having Their Own Oil Crisis - Bloomberg

Persian Gulf Countries Are Having Their Own Oil Crisis - Bloomberg:

Countries one through four on the list of the world’s biggest oil consumers in 2017 are pretty much who you’d expect them to be — the world’s four biggest economies. 1 No. 5 is something else: 

Saudi Arabia has just 33 million people, less than one-fourth as many as Russia, the country just below it on the list. Yes, it’s rich, but its gross domestic product ranks in the high teens worldwide, not fifth. By global standards, then, it clearly uses an inordinate amount of oil.

That amount, though, was actually down in 2017 from the year before. And therein lies a story, one that is told — quite well — in a new book titled “Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf.” It’s by Jim Krane, a former journalist who is now a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, and it combines a concise history of the region’s oil and gas boom and its consequences with an illuminating critique of the two main political science theories that have attempted to explain what oil riches mean for the region’s politics.