The most consequential proposal to surface at the 12th Riyadh Economic Forum, which closed Wednesday in Riyadh, concerned the state’s own machinery rather than any single market: a standing national center to measure whether the Kingdom’s laws and public policies deliver what they were written to achieve. After a decade in which Saudi Arabia has rewritten much of its commercial, civil and investment rulebook at speed, the forum’s final sessions turned to the question that follows naturally from that pace. Who checks what the new rules actually do?
The proposal rests on a study presented at the forum by legal consultant Najla Abdulrahman Al-Huqail, built on 312 public questionnaires, 76 responses from experts and decision-makers, six in-depth interviews with ministries and relevant organizations, and benchmarks drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, South Korea, New Zealand and Canada. “Today, when evaluating legislation or a public policy, we need to study it from different dimensions, not just one,” Al-Huqail told the session, as reported by Arab News. The study found gaps in specialized assessment capability, in coordination between government bodies, in data quality and in methodology: entities overlap in responsibility, struggle to share data, and evaluate their own output against inconsistent frameworks, with some agencies far ahead of others.
The study’s most telling finding sits at the bottom of its gap ranking. Political will was rated the smallest obstacle. That inverts the usual diagnosis applied to regulatory reform elsewhere, in which capability exists and commitment wavers. Here the commitment is assessed as present and the constraint is technical: trained evaluators, shared baselines, common indicators and the authority to demand data across institutional lines. Problems of capacity are slower to solve than problems of intent, but they respond to budgets and mandates, which is precisely what the forum’s speakers went on to propose.
Al-Huqail’s study recommends a hybrid model: a central authority that sets standards and reviews the quality of assessments, with specialized units inside ministries and agencies doing the sector work, applied both before a rule is issued and after it has run, with public consultation built in. Mohammed Abdulaziz Al-Jarba, a Shura Council member, went further, proposing a national center to assess public agency performance, legislative impact and international competitiveness, supported by a 17-article draft framework, with laws reviewed every five years after implementation. Abdullah Shuwaish Duwaihi of King Abdulaziz University added the economist’s caution: define the policy problem first, weigh non-legislative options, and count the government’s own design and implementation costs among the costs of regulating. He pointed to the existing Estila platform as a rail the system could build on rather than around.
The timing follows the money. The 2027 pre-budget statement committed the government to spending discipline through a projected deficit, and the Council of Economic and Development Affairs now reviews Vision 2030 program scorecards as routine machinery. As the capital program tightens, the premium shifts from writing rules to proving they work, because an ineffective regulation carries a fiscal cost somewhere: in compliance burden, in foregone investment, or in programs that run without evidence they move their targets. Ibrahim Al-Hudhaif of Sulaiman Al Rajhi Holding made the investor’s version of the argument at the same forum, listing the sectors opened to capital by recent regulatory change, from property ownership rules to mining and private credit. Rules are the Kingdom’s cheapest infrastructure, and the proposal treats them as an asset class that needs auditing like any other.
The forum has a direct stake in the answer. Fadhel Al-Buainain, a Shura Council member and economic commentator, judged that the forum met its objectives while naming the standing problem: “the main challenge is translating those recommendations into actionable plans that deliver a meaningful economic impact.” Across its history the forum has produced 384 recommendations, of which 57 have been adopted. A forum proposing a national apparatus for impact measurement is, in effect, proposing a remedy for its own conversion rate.
What to watch next is the path the proposal takes. Al-Jarba’s draft framework gives the Shura Council a vehicle if it chooses to move, and the Estila platform gives the government a place to start without building a new institution from the ground up. The forum’s formal recommendations, once issued, will show how much of the study survived the closing drafting. The nearer test arrives with the December budget, which will say, in riyals, how seriously the state takes the measurement of its own rules.