State-Owned Enterprises in Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia: Size, Costs, and Challenges

This report presents an overview of the SOE footprint and performance in the ME&CA region based on a quantitative survey of country authorities and other publicly available reports. Previous studies have found that SOEs in the ME&CA region tend to be more concentrated in the hydrocarbons, services, and industrial sectors. The sectoral footprint of SOEs has, however, varied across time and countries, in part reflecting changes in development models pur­sued by countries. In some countries, SOEs initially focused on strategic sec­tors, for example the oil sector in the GCC countries (OECD 2013). More recently, the GCC countries have expanded the scope of SOEs beyond the oil sector and some have very large multinational SOEs. In other countries, SOEs were initially established both in strategic and non-strategic sectors (for example, Egypt, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), partly as a result of a more socialist-oriented development model pursued by these countries. However, SOEs continue to play a sizeable role. In particular SOEs in the MENA region have been estimated to account for between 20 to 50 percent of value added and 30 percent of employment.