When Standard & Poor’s announced its decision to raise Kuwait’s credit rating and attach to it a “stable” outlook, a murmur moved through economic circles suggesting that a new page had opened in the state’s financial record: a page whose surface carried signs of reform and coherence of direction. At first glance, the scene appeared well-composed: references to improved regularity in reforms, solidity in financial positions, broader access to borrowing channels, and measured progress in plans to support revenues with non-oil sources. The agency’s statement came to reassure—with balanced language, neither excessive nor dismissive—that the Financing and Liquidity Law, issued in March 2025, had opened a wider horizon for arrangements capable of financing the coming years, and that the official vision was proceeding toward expanding income fields, strengthening infrastructure, and raising the capacity of public finances to withstand and endure.
The statement did not overlook the strength and abundance of sovereign assets, nor growth of 1.3% in the first half of 2025, with expectations that it may expand to around 2% during 2025–2028, despite the surrounding dependence on oil, fluctuations in its prices, the persistent weight of current expenditure, and a deficit estimated at around 7% of GDP. This reading—despite its brightness—remains a reading of the surface, not the interior. It grants the state a space of reassurance and greater confidence in debt markets, yet financial texts, like verses recited, are not taken by their surface alone, but by understanding what lies beneath them. Numbers, however illuminating, do not speak alone; they are understood in their context. “For every news there is a settled outcome.” Therefore, the rating upgrade is not a conclusion at which the book may be closed, but the opening of a chapter that requires deeper reflection and insight.
What the Rating Proves — and What It Cannot Prove
The purpose of this analytical reading is not to challenge good news that arrived at its time, nor to diminish an effort into which energy has been poured, nor to stir unjustified doubt in people’s minds. Rather, the purpose is to place the rating in its proper position on the scale of understanding, neither burdening it with what it cannot bear nor stripping it of what it signifies. A credit rating, as established in its industry, is nothing more than a measure of the state’s financial solvency and its ability to meet its obligations when they fall due. It weighs the size of sovereign assets against corresponding liabilities, observes the depth and liquidity of reserves, measures ease of access to debt markets and its cost, evaluates the state’s history of repayment and discipline, and notes the solidity of the monetary framework and the structure of fiscal policy. In the language of specialists, it is a judgment on the probability of default, not on the capacity for prosperity; on the ability to pay, not the ability to earn.
As for the economy in its deeper meaning, it has another door and a different standard. It is measured by the strength of productive structures that create wealth, not those that spend it; by the sustainability of income that renews itself from the sweat of work, not from the rent of sale; and by the market’s ability to grow organically through competition, exports, and accumulated value, not through the recycling of government money into local activity. A state may have high financial solvency because of the magnitude of liquid assets, saved funds, or abundant sellable resources under its control, yet when asked about its productive economy, one may find it limited in scope, weakly connected to external markets, and poorly diversified in its sources of earning. Financial solvency is not necessarily evidence of a fortified economy, just as limited financial resources do not mean—if the structure is sound—a limited future.
If one wishes for an example that brings the meaning closer without trivializing it: financial strength is like what a traveler places in his pack of provisions and a mount that carries him and suffices him for a time on the road; economic strength is to have land to cultivate, water running through its veins, a craft that produces, and a market that exports, so that when the provisions are exhausted, the source of life is not exhausted. The first helps endure shocks; the second establishes prosperity over time. The first may arise from a favorable circumstance, a high price, or a great stockpile; the second arises only through long-breathed engineering: education that grows skill, legislation that matures a market, infrastructure that facilitates production, and policy that turns resources into added value.
From here, confusing a higher rating with the completion of reform is a confusion between evidence and what it indicates. Structural reform, which reshapes public finances and moves the economy from dependence on one resource to multiple sources of income, is not completed except at a significant cost. A financial cost when expenditure categories are restructured and funds are directed toward productive transformation rather than consumption; a social cost when benefits are redistributed according to eligibility rather than habit; a political cost because major decisions are not made in a vacuum free from public opinion or institutional balances; and even a credit cost—in some phases—because liquidity may contract, the deficit may rise temporarily, or transitional debt may increase, causing the rating to decline for a period before settling at a higher level once the causes of sustainability are complete.
That is because rating agencies look at the present with accounting tools that give weight to solvency now, while reform looks to the future with a logic that accepts a heavier burden in one year so it may become lighter over ten, and accepts the decline of a temporary balance so that a lasting balance may rise. It is not strange for a state—if it is sincere in transformation—to see its credit rating fall during the construction phase, then rise with firmness after it; for the lesson is not in a value polished for a season, but in a capacity rooted for a generation.
If the rating has risen today, the question required by mature reason is not: “Why did it rise?” for its reasons are clear. Rather, it is: “Which path must we take so that this rise is not temporary on the back of passing financial strength, but evidence of a sustainable productive economy?” More precisely: what will make this rating remain tomorrow where it stands and not depart, when markets are no longer hostage to a price, the budget no longer captive to one resource, and growth no longer dependent on spending that expands at times and contracts at others? That is the matter; everything else is a detail following the origin.
What the Rating Agency Overlooked — and What Must Be Corrected with Wisdom and Long Vision
Reports by rating agencies—however precise their craft—remain governed by a global angle of vision that counts what appears on paper and assumes the continuity of what is mentioned in plans. They may be right in one estimate and miss another. Therefore, we must complete the picture with what the country knows of its own details, not in the spirit of skepticism, but in the spirit of completion. Sound judgment does not become comfortable with the surface of the news until it searches its interior. Below are weighty areas that the agency did not adequately weigh, and what should be built upon them through a firm practical vision.
First: On the Sustainability of Reform — and Its Link to the Balance of Politics
The agency spoke of the progress of reform as though it were an uninterrupted flowing river, while the reality in the Kuwaiti experience is that reform, in many of its phases, advances as much as the margin of agreement between authorities widens, and slows as much as that margin narrows. Economic decision-making in Kuwait does not take place in a purely technical vacuum, but in a sensitive political arena where even a slight change in mood can delay transformation projects for years.
This fragility is not treated by slogans, but by institutional measures that rise above change:
(1) Fixing reform within an independent legislative framework: Here we refer to the transition from the logic of intermittent initiatives to the logic of a state extending through time. It is not enough for a government to approve a reform program, however sound it may be, as long as its existence is tied to the government’s political lifespan and its authority remains suspended on the mood of the moment or the balances of assemblies. Rather, the program—once it satisfies the conditions of economic prudence—must become an enforceable law with binding force, so that successive governments adhere to it as they adhere to the budget, civil service rules, and expenditure regulations. Reform, if it is not made a legislated public right, remains a promise that the winds cancel at the first shift in the arena.
The law, in this context, is not an end in itself, but a tool to protect the path of transformation from interruption. It restricts retreat from reform except with a high justification passing through sovereign channels, requiring a statement of the financial and economic impact and an alternative that ensures the state does not return to the same cycle of rotation. Technically, this principle is what makes reform part of the “legislative structure of the economy,” not part of ministerial decisions; because economies that succeeded in moving from a rentier economy to a productive one did not do so through circumstantial decisions, but through legislative norms that restrict the hand of retreat as much as they open the hand of progress, and link the reform path to a timeline that does not stop when a government stops or when a passing political obstacle occurs.
In this way, reform is transformed from an administrative project into a pillar of the state, and from a policy subject to replacement into a rule that is not touched except for the highest justifications. The path becomes steady, the phases become orderly, and public money becomes a servant of a system that expands rather than retreats.
(2) Establishing a Supreme Economic Council with executive, not advisory, authority: A council not dependent on the changing of ministries, but connected to the highest leadership, possessing tools to follow up implementation, tying plans to results, and moving reform from the garment of mood to the garment of method. We have expanded on this conception—with its details and nuances—in a previous article titled:
“The Supreme Economic Council”: A Sovereign Scale for Correcting the Path, published on October 23, 2025, where the need was explained for a higher body that holds the threads of economic reform at the level of policies rather than procedures, gives the state a fixed scale that measures the path rather than the rhetoric, and moves governments from seasonal decisions to regularity of vision and soundness of implementation.
(3) Approving ten-year reform pathways in the form of “national performance contracts”: An economy cannot be built on short-lived steps, but on long pathways recorded in the register of the state, not in the registers of governments. The national contract here is not a document of intentions, but a roadmap divided into defined time phases. In each phase, a precise target, a means to achieve it, an indicator to measure its impact, and an accountability mechanism are stated, obliging the executive apparatus to explain what was completed, what was not, and why.
In economic logic, reform does not reach its purpose unless it is transformed into measurable numbers, traceable steps, and reviewable commitments. Therefore, ten-year contracts allow the state to govern the transition from one phase to another and to connect investment with results and fiscal policy with productive structure. Plans are no longer hostage to assumption or impression, but are tested in reality as hypotheses are tested in a controlled laboratory.
Technically, ten-year contracts are a means of regulating economic time. They give the state the ability to redistribute effort and money according to fixed priorities, reduce the effect of political fluctuations on the reform path, and ensure that every phase is a brick placed upon another, not a correction of what came before or a reversal of it. Reform that is not measured is not achieved, and reform that is not held accountable does not stand upright. But what binds those responsible for it through a written and declared national contract becomes a project that does not rise by an individual decision, but by collective awareness and a state will that does not leave its future to seasonal change.
In this way, the rating upgrade is invested so that it becomes a lever for the stability of decision, not a passing occasion.
Second: On the Economy’s Ability to Create Non-Oil Income — Not as Accounting, but as Reality
The agency did not properly estimate the structure on which what is called Kuwait’s non-oil economy is based. Most of what is listed under this title is not production that generates value, but import-based trading activity that lives on the breadth of public expenditure more than on its own ability. Kuwait, in its current condition, does not possess a fully linked industrial base, nor agriculture that can be considered a meaningful support, nor a private sector rooted in fields of production as much as it is active in trade, intermediation, and redistribution. Even what is classified as non-oil exports remains narrow in competitiveness and limited in impact, not representing a weight that can be relied upon in the equation of economic independence. Therefore, non-oil revenues may grow arithmetically through fees, taxes, or service returns, but all of that does not create independence or grant the state’s economy sovereign immunity. Independence is not built on rearranging collection inside an economy that imports more than it produces, but on creating external income generated from goods and services that enter world markets with added value, not under the shadow of government spending.
The technical path to this is not impossible, but it requires turning finance into production engineering through:
(1) Establishing transformative industry with a Gulf-oriented function: Light and medium industries that feed the markets of the Gulf and North Africa and rely on Kuwait’s logistical advantage and maritime location connecting East and West. Small industry, when connected to extended regional chains, becomes large in its impact and takes its place in the value-added system, instead of remaining a local activity of limited benefit.
This meaning was expanded, in its intellectual root and institutional foundation, in our article published on October 30, 2025, titled:
“The National Registry of Export Output”: The Ascent of Prudence Toward Productive and Sustainable Investment, where the need was proposed to create a national registry that measures the origin of produced value, not the volume of imports recirculated. This would enable the state to distinguish between what raises income and what raises the bill. Transformative industries—if directed according to the registry and its rules—do not only create export potential; they necessarily reduce imports, close gaps that drain the trade balance, and open the door to productive substitution that turns part of state spending into recurring value, not into a benefit that is consumed and disappears.
From here, linking industry to the national registry of exports is not a mere organizational detail, but a condition for industry to arise on the logic of the economy, not the whims of the market; on reducing imports and raising added value, not increasing consumption in a new garment.
(2) Building a complete logistical export system: It is a pillar without which the production project is not complete—after the Almighty. Exporting does not stand through a single factory, even if well made, but through an extended network of ports, storage areas, maritime services, insurance, assembly, and re-export. Experiences that built their strength through the sea did not begin with industry itself, but with the gateway to the world; a gateway that makes the product part of international value chains, not captive to the local market.
This meaning, in its depth and applications, was explained in our article published on August 28, 2025, titled:
“The Public Authority for Supporting Non-Oil Export Output: Sustainability”, where a conception was presented for a sovereign institution concerned with enabling exports and reducing imports together; so that the state does not merely facilitate the exit of its products, but reshapes the structure of its foreign trade in such a way that imports that can be substituted locally diminish, and the range of goods and services capable of entering world markets with confidence and continuity expands.
Thus, the logistical system becomes a passage not merely for a commodity, but part of an economic policy that turns the country from a station of consumption into a center of production and export, and recalibrates the trade balance so that it rests on added value rather than the widening appetite for imports.
(3) Redefining the northern regions: The purpose is not to create a new urban patch added to the map of consumption, but to establish an export-oriented productive corridor whose function is to support the economy, not burden it. Economic zones, if not built on the logic of added value and instead become an extension of the culture of consumption rather than productive capacity, become a costly burden. They neither support the trade balance nor give the market the ability to expand organically.
This meaning—with its three layers—was expanded in our article published on September 10, 2025, titled:
“The Triple Economy”: When Glory Is Built Brick by Brick, where the state’s economy was divided into three frameworks: “Kuwait of the Present,” with its existing reality; “Kuwait of Transformation,” with the tools it carries to move the economy to a higher phase; and “Kuwait of the Future,” with what should be built to reflect the image of the state in the coming decades. In light of this classification, the northern regions were not merely a geographical project, but a link between these three entities: stimulating productive efficiency in Kuwait of the Present, providing transformation tools in Kuwait of Transformation, and preparing the construction of a future economy where exports are the locomotive, not the follower, and production is the origin, not the exception. Therefore, making the northern regions the equivalent of “Kuwait of the Future” is not achieved by creating new facilities, but by turning them into a gateway that supports today’s economy, accelerates tomorrow’s economy, and moves the state from the captivity of imports to the space of production, in one connected context where bricks are laid one by one, as we discussed in that article.
With this structure, the true meaning of non-oil revenue is achieved: revenue arising from an external market, not from the pocket of the budget.
Third: On the Inflation of Obligations — When Expenditures Run Ahead of Resources
The report focused on assets and reserves, but quickly glanced at another side of the equation: the state’s long-term obligations, which naturally expand over time. Salaries, subsidies, transfers, retirement, and care all grow with population growth, rising costs, and delayed structural reform. If these obligations are not managed, they turn abundance into silent pressure that consumes fiscal space year after year.
The strategic solution is not crude cuts that provoke society, but intelligent recalibration:
(1) Transitioning to targeted subsidies: This is a necessary step to disentangle social justice from the efficiency of public finances. Replacing general commodity subsidies—which leak to those who do not deserve them and consume more public money than they rescue vulnerable groups—with cash or service support that reaches the place of need achieves two purposes at once: it establishes justice and returns to the budget its space for investment and production.
We addressed this matter in greater detail in our article published on October 16, 2025, titled:
“Subsidies”: Between the Gentleness of Policy and the Justice of the Scale, where it was explained that subsidies, in their current form, are not as much a tool of care as they are a tool of broad, undiscriminating consumption, and that true justice is not obtained through generality, but by reaching those in need and no others. This idea—if well applied—does not only ease the financial burden, but also frees the state’s capacity to redirect what used to go to consumption into resources invested in production structures. Social policy then becomes a support for economic renaissance, not a rival to it.
(2) Re-engineering retirement with national savings tools: This is not merely an amendment to a passing financial item, but a reordering of a long-term social contract between the state and its citizens; a contract that tests the solidity of public finances tomorrow as much as it tests the reassurance of generations. If the retirement system is left on its natural path with longer lifespans and more entrants into the labor market, it becomes—by the logic of calculation—a growing obligation that accumulates in the shadows until it rises above the capacity of the budget, drains its surplus, narrows its investment space, and turns abundance from building energy into a maintenance burden.
Therefore, wisdom requires that retirement not be viewed only as an “end-of-service reward,” but as a fund for the sustainability of public finances and a bridge of security for society. Its reform should not violate an acquired right or demolish accumulated trust, but should introduce tools that restore balance between what is saved today and what is owed tomorrow, and between what the state bears and what the savings system itself bears.
These tools appear in two mutually supporting paths:
(a) Flexible early professional pathways instead of “silent early retirement”: The reality is that many retirement systems are drained not because of natural aging, but because of uncontrolled early exits that push the fund to pay pensions for periods longer than those on which the original calculations were built. The solution here is not to prohibit early retirement rigidly, but to design flexible pathways that make early exit a conditional, gradual option: part of the pension is earned, and part is completed through part-time work, transition to training programs, or advisory service. In this way, years that were once counted as a pure burden become years of production or participation, and the system restores its balance without social collision.
(b) Aligning eligibility age and pension benefits with demographic changes: Not by confiscation, but through “gradual liberalization” that respects the nature of society. Every increase in life expectancy and every change in the structure of the market requires careful review of the equation: how many years do we pay, and for how many years do we save? Financial equations cannot stand if the numbers of life change while regulations remain fixed. Such review should be gradual and clear, announced years before implementation, so that trust is built on certainty, not surprise.
By introducing these two paths, future cost is not merely reduced; the relationship between work and saving is reformulated. Retirement becomes the fruit of a saved lifetime, not a one-sided grant from the state, and the system moves from a “single guarantor” to “multi-levered guarantee.” Its sustainability strengthens, and the budget is freed to finance productive transformation instead of being drained by obligations that expand without limit. This matter, though it appears technical on the surface, is in truth one of the great places of wisdom; because nations are measured not only by what they spend today, but by what they can guarantee tomorrow without destroying their foundation. Whoever manages retirement well has managed time well; and whoever manages time well secures the future of the state and the people together.
(3) Moving part of subsidy spending toward “productive empowerment”: This is one of the doors of economic prudence, where the philosophy of support shifts from guaranteeing consumption whose effect dissipates to stimulating production whose return grows. Instead of directing public money toward extinguishing the cost of daily life that never ends, part of it is employed to support serious home-based projects, small industries that create value, and export incubators that take the local product beyond the narrow market into wider markets. In this way, support moves from being an expense consumed to being micro-capital that generates new income, becoming a root treatment for part of the problems of income and work, not a temporary sedative for them.
This approach was detailed—from a legislative and regulatory angle—in our article published on September 25, 2025, titled:
“The Generality of the National Fund Law”: Between the Virtue of Flexibility and the Defect of Deviation, where it was shown that the National Fund, if left in its generality without precise controls, turns from a tool of empowerment into a tool of ambiguity that absorbs resources without creating real value. It was noted then that productive empowerment does not succeed through financing alone, but requires legislative engineering that defines acceptable projects, links support to real production indicators, and prevents it from sliding into consumption dressed in the garment of “entrepreneurship.”
The other dimension of this idea—from the angle of export and import reduction—was also explained in our article published on August 28, 2025, titled:
“The Public Authority for Supporting Non-Oil Export Output: Sustainability”, where a conception was presented for a sovereign institution that redirects support toward activities that reduce imports and open export doors. It would support small industries capable of productive substitution and identify local projects capable of entering global value chains. If realized, that authority would be the link between public money and export capacity, between subsidy and feasibility, and between the state and the world market.
From the combination of these two paths—the legislative path that preserves the integrity of empowerment, and the export path that gives it an external dimension—subsidy transforms from a financial burden into an economic lever, and from a continuing cost into renewable value, becoming one of the tools of structural transformation rather than one of the remnants of consumer welfare policy.
In this way, the “internal hole” is closed before it widens, and the shell remains solid, not merely shiny.
Fourth: On Controlling Current Expenditure — When Habit Becomes a System
Current expenditure in Kuwait has become entrenched, through the accumulation of years and the overlap of customs with interests, in a position that is almost treated as an untouchable constant. It has become, in political and social awareness, like the roof that shades everyone, not a tool to be measured by the scale of feasibility. By contrast, capital expenditure—the true place of transformation—has become the closest item to sacrifice at the first sign of pressure, as though the seed is sacrificed to preserve the fruit, or the root is uprooted to preserve the branch. This equation does not merely warn of a passing fiscal deficit, but of an extended developmental deficit; because current spending, however wide it becomes, does not grow a productive economy. It keeps movement within the circle of consumption and redistribution, while capital spending alone opens the door to added value and turns money from cost into capacity, from expense into investment, and from a consumed present into a productive future.
Technically, economies living on a rentier resource—as Kuwait does with oil—do not have the luxury of making current expenditure the leader of the budget. Current expenditure, by nature, creates “permanent obligations” that automatically expand over time: salaries, subsidies, and services. Meanwhile, rentier revenue is volatile and cannot be guaranteed to continue. If the obligation side is permanent and the revenue side fluctuates, the balance is flawed at its foundation, even if assets are abundant today; because assets are gradually consumed when they feed an obligation that does not stop. Therefore, expenditure reform is not a matter of superficial rationalization, but a rebuilding of the architecture of public finances themselves: arranging the relationship between what consumes and what produces, between what bequeaths a burden and what bequeaths a return.
If correcting this imbalance is a necessity, not an option, it rests on three mutually supporting pillars. None replaces the other, and none succeeds alone without the others:
(1) Protecting capital expenditure legislatively and sovereignly: The aim is not merely to protect certain projects, but to protect the “right of the future” within the budget. A legal framework should be enacted that gives capital expenditure a status higher than cyclical fluctuations, so that it is not reduced except under high sovereign controls and after testing its impact on the transformation path. A capital project is not a financial item to be increased or decreased according to a year or a mood, but a long-term developmental commitment reflected in productivity, the creation of quality jobs, the attraction of investment, and the efficiency of the economy itself. When the state leaves it hostage to fluctuations, it delays transformation every time the wind blows, whether it realizes it or not.
(2) Establishing an independent capital fund for major projects: This fund would rest on a clear philosophy: transformative projects are not financed from “the crumbs of surplus,” nor left to compete with current expenditure in the annual budget. Rather, they are assigned an independent vessel funded from surpluses of good years and from long-term debt instruments when markets receive them favorably. The fund would be managed by performance contracts, not slogans, defining implementation schedules, completion ratios, and indicators of direct and indirect economic return. The purpose is for capital financing to become a stable, uninterrupted path, and for its projects to be released from competition with daily expenses; because such competition is a corruption of priorities, however natural it may appear.
(3) Linking current expenditure to productivity indicators and accountability rules: In the scale of economics, there is no meaning to salaries expanding where achievement does not expand with them, nor to permanent expenses in an apparatus whose efficiency does not rise as its budget rises. Linking current spending to indicators means redefining it not as an absolute right, but as compensation for benefit and a cost in exchange for performance. The logic of measurement should enter current expenditure items: what improved? What was achieved? What raised the productivity of the apparatus? What reduced the cost of administrative time? When current expenditure is separated from performance, it becomes inflation rather than care, and a burden that reproduces itself without limit.
When these three pillars are gathered into one system, expenditure moves from being a “vent” that absorbs surpluses and then demands more, to being an “engine” that creates surpluses and deserves them. Only then does public money become a tool for building an economy that feeds on its production, not an economy that feeds on its spending. A state that arranges its expenditure well is, in truth, arranging its destiny well; because the budget is not numbers added and subtracted, but a practical translation of the philosophy of survival and the path of prudence.
Fifth: On Vision — When the Text Is Greater Than the Machine
As for Vision 2035, despite the nobility of its purpose and the elevation of its aim, it remains, on the scale of implementation, too light to carry the burdens of the phase or to rise to what the time requires of deep structural transformation. It is a document of well-crafted language and broad ambition, but—in its current form—it is closer to a map without roads, or a destination without means. There are no binding implementation schedules in which years and months are defined, no detailed responsibilities assigning tasks to entities and leaders, no measurement indicators that follow the work from beginning to end, and no accountability that moves shortcoming from the shadow of generalities into the light of truth. A vision without an implementation machine is like a sea without a ship: wide on the horizon, but unable to carry anyone to the shore.
Because great visions are not completed by wishes, but by tools and policies, addressing this deficiency is not done by expanding texts, but by constructing a new implementation architecture based on three strategic pillars:
(1) Transforming the vision into a binding government program that transcends governments: It is not enough for the vision to be mentioned in ministerial statements or raised as a slogan on the fronts of institutions. It must become a legislated national program that ties every ministry and every agency to defined performance contracts, stating what is achieved, what is measured, and what is subject to accountability. A vision that changes with ministers is not called a vision, and a vision rewritten every four years cannot establish a state project or an economy built over decades.
Transforming the vision into a binding program means that its implementation becomes a legal duty, not an administrative directive, and that budgets and executive roles are linked to the extent of progress along its paths. Here, the role of the “Supreme Economic Council”—explained in our article published on October 23, 2025, titled:
“The Supreme Economic Council”: A Sovereign Scale for Correcting the Path—emerges as the body capable of turning the vision into a path the state binds by law, not merely a document appearing on occasions.
We explained there that the council, if established with effective sovereign authority, would possess the ability to set structures, issue legislation supporting the vision, link it to the state’s financial path, and strip it of a ceremonial character in favor of an institutional one in which everyone is held accountable and implementation is followed precisely, unaffected by the changing of governments.
(2) Establishing an independent central unit to measure economic and sectoral performance: If the vision is not measured, it remains in the realm of wishes. Many states stumbled not because they lost resources, but because they lost the ability to measure. Therefore, the presence of a performance measurement unit directly reporting to the leadership, announcing its results quarter after quarter, and visible to both the people and officials, is what turns the vision from open text into a record governed by numbers.
This unit must be truly independent, not subordinate to a minister or an agency that changes by decision. It must be fixed in its place and treat the vision as a long-term national contract. It measures what is achieved and what is delayed, identifies places of failure, and issues reports that cannot be interpreted away. States are not built through secrecy, but through precise transparency that shows everyone the places of strength as it shows the places of weakness.
(3) Establishing the rule of “replacement upon failure” instead of accumulating sympathy for weak performance: Systems do not advance when sympathy outweighs accountability, and states do not rise when positions remain rewards rather than functions. If the vision is a national covenant, then failure in one part of it must be failure in the performance of a position within the state, and the natural result of that must be replacement, not apology; review, not justification. This is not harshness, but wisdom. Great projects are not managed by courtesies, but by one logic: whoever achieves continues, and whoever does not achieve is replaced. This is what makes the vision capable of life, not ink preserved in drawers.
Vision 2035, with the ambition it carries, can be a turning point in the state’s path, or it can remain—as others have remained—an eloquent paper that does not cross its own edges. The difference between the two destinies is not in the text, but in the tools: in the higher council that legislates it, the measurement unit that follows it, and the rule of accountability that regulates it. When the vision possesses a law that supports it, a council that corrects it, and a machine that measures it, it transforms from a good idea into a state project that moves through time without being shaken by the wind.
Sixth: On Borrowing — When It Is Either a Bridge or a Veil
As for the Financing and Liquidity Law, despite expanding the state’s ability to access debt markets and providing a regulatory framework that organizes borrowing instruments, it is—in the balance of structural transformation—like a useful key that does not open the door by itself, but requires an expert hand that knows how to use it. The law addresses one side of the means, but not the core of the structure. The structure is not changed by making borrowing available, but by the economy’s ability to produce what justifies that borrowing. The danger, the full danger, is that debt becomes an easy substitute for reform: the deficit is managed by widening the door of borrowing rather than reducing the causes of the deficit, and today’s problems are carried into a heavier future multiplied by interest and accumulated obligations.
Debt, if not tied to production that guarantees its repayment, becomes—even with a higher credit rating—a wager on an uncertain time, and turns the state’s financial strength into a shiny shell over an unstable structure. Therefore, regulating debt management is a strategic necessity, not an accounting option. Economies that depend on a depletable resource, such as oil, do not have the luxury of free borrowing; they must make debt governed by a precise equation in which obligations do not exceed the economy’s real capacity to generate value.
This principle was expanded in our article published on August 14, 2025, titled:
“From Oil to Diversification: A New Equation for Managing Public Debt”, where it was explained that public debt, if it is to be a prudent tool, must have its ceiling determined by only two sustainable factors in the GDP equation: productive investment and export output. These two alone—not rentier revenues nor passing fees—represent the permanent ability of the economy to create its own value. Everything else, however coherent it may appear in the moment, cannot be a foundation upon which long-term obligations are built.
According to this understanding, regulating the path of borrowing can only be achieved through three mutually supporting controls:
(1) Linking every new debt to a productive project with a defined return: The rule here is not cosmetic, but a “solid financial rule”: no debt without return, and no borrowing without a clear productive justification. Every new issuance of debt instruments should be linked to a project that creates productive capacity—directly or indirectly—capable of servicing and repaying the debt. This is what states that built modern economies do: they make debt an “engine,” not a “rescuer,” and connect every borrowing operation to a defined economic feasibility that is monitored and held accountable. Borrowing that finances a factory, a port, a logistical zone, or a technological project differs fundamentally from borrowing that finances current expenditure consumed within a year and leaving no trace.
(2) Prohibiting borrowing to finance the consumer deficit through a clear legislative text: This prohibition is not a restriction, but a protection for public finances. One of the greatest mistakes of states dependent on a single revenue source is to fill gaps in their consumer deficit through debt, only to find themselves years later facing a doubled obligation: the original deficit on one side, and debt installments with interest on the other. Thus, the future is drained to finance a present in which nothing has changed. The presence of an explicit legislative text prohibiting the financing of current expenses through debt confines borrowing to one door: productive investment. In this way, the state moves from a policy of “financial sedation” to a policy of “economic generation.”
(3) Turning debt into a tool of growth, not a tool of sedation: This means that the success of borrowing is measured not by the financing transaction itself, nor by its low cost, nor by the size of demand for it, but by what it adds to the economy in productive capacity: did exports increase? Did added value rise? Did the import bill decline? Did institutional productivity improve? Did quality job opportunities increase?
When debt is measured by these standards, it turns from a “deferred burden” into a “growth lever,” from a financial item into a transformation tool, and from a potential constraint into a bridge for building an economy capable of serving itself.
Borrowing, when left without rules, becomes a fast road to postponing crises; when regulated by the rule of investment and exports, it becomes a door to diversification and sustainability. Therefore, the Financing and Liquidity Law—despite its importance—must be completed by a broader methodology that makes public debt judged by the economy’s ability to create capacity, not by spending’s desire to expand. Debt is neither absolute evil nor pure good; it is a tool, and tools are sound only according to the soundness of those who use them. A state that makes its borrowing a bridge to production makes its future wider than its present; but a state that makes it a cushion for consumption narrows its tomorrow by what it expands today.
In sum, what the agency overlooked is not a flaw in its craft nor a deficiency in its tools. Rating agencies look from a global angle governed by the official data available to them and fixed financial standards. The limitation lies in the fact that an angle of vision—however wide—does not encompass the details of the land known only by its people. It reads financial strength well, but it does not reach the depth of economic strength, nor does it measure the structural transformations beneath the surface or the internal balances of politics and the norms of society.
What we need, then, is not to reject the news or diminish it, but to place it in its proper position: a testimony to the strength of solvency, not to the completion of the path; a signal of what can be built upon, not what should be relied upon. The rating rises today by the strength of assets, but it remains tomorrow only by the strength of production. It rises with abundant liquidity, but it stabilizes only through the economy’s ability to generate its own income. It rises with good financial management, but it becomes rooted only if institutionality expands in reform and sustainability strengthens in decision-making.
If the rating upgrade remains confined to money, it will be passing like lightning: appearing in the sky of data, then fading at the first change in markets. But if it crosses into the economy—becoming an industry of work, a foundation for institutions, an expansion of the production base, a rise in export output, a reduction in dependence on imports, and a liberation of public finances from the burdens of current expenditure—then it becomes a lasting rise that does not vanish, because it rests on land that grows value, not on a resource that may be depleted.
The true rating is not proven by the credit rating alone, but when the state’s financial strength becomes a result of the strength of its economy, not compensation for it; and when money becomes a servant of an expanding productive structure, not a veil over a fixed structure that does not move. Only then does Kuwait move from a state praised for its solvency to a state praised for its capability; from an economy waiting for the price to an economy making value; and from a rating read in a global report to a strength read in people’s reality and in the future of generations.
The rating upgrade, despite the good news it contains, is a testimony to be praised, but it does not spare us from the larger question: how do we establish an economy that remains firm in its strength even when conditions around it change, and stands on its pillars even if the rating one day bends under the weight of circumstances? The elevation we witness today is the fruit of a solid financial reality. But the elevation we want tomorrow is an entitlement attained only through a vision that knows its aim, institutions that govern the work, tireless seriousness, and the capacity to bear the cost of reform when it becomes heavy; because true construction does not stand without a price, and its pillars do not stand without long patience. Perhaps the saying of the wise suffices beyond elaboration: “Nothing remains of construction except what was built with wisdom, and no path stands straight except what was drawn by reason.”
If the rating upgrade is evidence that the road has opened, then the question required of us—not as rhetoric, but as determination and choice—is this: will we walk this road with steps befitting a state written to be at the head of the procession, not at its tail; and to have its future made by its own hands, not by the factors surrounding it?
O Allah, ordain for this nation a matter of right guidance.