violent activities (Besley et al., 2019), and public support for foreign military interventions (Fetzer et al., 2021). Our paper focuses on news media coverage and sentiment about economic reforms in the GCC.

We use newspaper data from the Dow Jones News Snapshot API. This global news database provides access to newspaper articles from thousands of sources in 28 languages. In addition to the full text, it also includes tags for each document, which identify the following: (i) country or countries discussed in the article, (ii) the country of origin of the newspaper, and (iii) the subject(s) of the articles. For this paper, we carefully select articles in the 28 languages which contain terms relating to "economy" and "reforms" for each of the six GCC countries (see Appendix A4). Our methodology yields 138,782 articles that are tagged to one or more of the six GCC countries. Of these, 46% are in English, 39% are in Arabic, and the remaining 15% are in 26 other languages. Therefore, this paper focuses on English and Arabic media.

# IV.1 Engagement in Discussions on Economic Reform the from News Media

We begin by analyzing the evolution of reform coverage across the GCC countries. We find that the number of economic reform articles varies significantly over time and across countries. To address this, we create an index for each country that captures _the percentage of all news articles that discuss economic reforms_ . In other words, we normalize the number of economic reform articles about a country by the total number of articles about that country. For country in year , the index has the following form R R R R I = 100 ×ii E E E tt <u>,</u> ~~.~~ iiEE R RREERREE AARRttiiEEAARRssii tt CChaat IIRRIIii,tt TTEEttTTAA AARRttiiEEAARRssii,tt The reform chatter index can be classified by source: local news (e.g., UAE newspapers writing about the UAE), GCC international news (e.g., Bahraini newspapers writing about the UAE), and non-GCC international news. The index can also be classified into different reform topics based on topic analysis techniques. Appendix A5 provides a detailed description of the topic analysis as well as its findings.

Figure IV.1 shows the overall index and the subindices by source type. The reform chatter index for the GCC is in the same range as emerging G20 countries in recent years. However, Saudi Arabia has the highest chatter index in recent years, much higher than the emerging G20 average. In addition, reform talks spike around important years. For example, the chatter index rises for Bahrain and Oman around the Arab Spring, indicating a response of economic reform discussions to political pressure. Saudi Arabia has seen a strong rise in reform chatter, consistent with its significant reform agenda in recent years. The figures also show how reform chatter from local sources is consistently lower than that from international sources in many GCC countries, except Qatar. This finding suggests a _relative_ disengagement from economic reform discussions from local media and potentially other local stakeholders.

Another aspect of the relative local disengagement is that reform chatter in local media is less responsive to economic shocks than international media. We focus on commodity price shocks (which is dominated by oil price for the GCC countries).<sup>10</sup> When commodity prices are low, chatter in the GCC increases. Interestingly, in these moments, chatter rises more significantly in international news than in local news (see Figure IV.2), pointing to relative disengagement with economic reforms from local media.

> 10 A commodity price shock of a country at time is constructed by Gruss and Kebhaj (2019), as follows = ∑ )Ω , where is the price of commodity in year ; Ω denote commodity-specific average share of commodity tt in the country’s export. For the GCC, oil constitute a big share of exports. JJ tt Δ log(CCR CCII) jj=1 jj,tt jj jj,tt jj Δlog (CC CC jj tt

> jj 12