insightful analyses that are not possible with traditional economic reform data or surveys.<sup>3</sup> For example, the paper measures engagement in economic reforms by constructing the share of news articles that discuss economic reforms. Sections III and IV discuss this in detail.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section II takes stock of the GCC's past and current economic reforms. It constructs a novel data set of passed laws and decrees by web-scraping national legislative archives from 1980 to 2019. Section III uses tweets in Arabic and text analysis techniques to understand the population's engagement and support for economic reforms. Section IV provides a similar analysis using a large data set of newspaper articles on economic reforms in English and Arabic. Finally, Section V concludes.

Section II reveals that reform efforts have intensified in recent years. The number of laws and decrees passed in the GCC has been quickly rising, driven partly by GCC countries’ efforts to diversify their economies. However, these nations tend to pass more laws and decrees in stronger than weaker policy areas, indicating that reforms do not address lagging policy areas.

Section III documents increasing engagement but declining support for economic reforms from the population in recent years. The number of engaged users who tweet about economic reforms has increased in recent years. In addition, the number of economic reform tweets per engaged user has been rising dramatically. However, the sentiment of economic reform tweets is worsening, suggesting either growing discontent about the current economic situation or shrinking support for the current direction of economic reforms.

Section IV shows that international media is more engaged in economic reform discussions in the GCC countries than local media (and potentially domestic participants, more broadly). In addition, international media is more critical of the GCC’s current economic situation or the directions of current economic reforms compared with local media. Sentiment from international media matters because it is correlated with FDI inflows into the GCC.

# II. Taking Stock of Economic Reforms in the GCC

This section takes stock of the implemented economic reforms in the GCC because their content and focus could impact engagement and support from the population and other stakeholders. The objective is to understand whether these reforms are geared towards lagging policy areas. In doing so, a novel database of laws and decrees passed by the GCC countries is constructed. Data are obtained by web-scraping countries’ national legislative archives (see Appendix A1 for the details). All recorded laws and decrees from 1980 to 2019 are collected for each country. Each downloaded legislation has a title, source, and date of the legislation.<sup>4</sup>

## II.1 A Novel Database of Laws and Decrees in the GCC

Since we focus on economic reforms, we map the extracted laws and decrees to ten economic policy

> 3 For example, the Arab Barometer (https://www.arabbarometer.org/) surveys people’s view about current economic conditions among other issues in the MENA region. This is a related, but narrower, approach. GCC countries are not typically covered in the Arab Barometer. For example, only Kuwait was covered in the Fifth Wave (2018-2019).

> 4 Since many laws are in unpassable pdf or image format, we did not obtain the full content of all laws. This is left for future research.

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