# I. Introduction

Before the pandemic, growth in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) recorded a noticeable slowdown due to structural barriers and shocks. The region experienced a systematic slowdown in growth, with the average growth rate declining from 4.6% between 2000 and 2009 to 3% between 2010 and 2019. As a result, most MENA countries lagged behind their income peers in growth in income per capita over the last two decades (Arezki et al., 2020a). In addition, the region has shown considerable heterogeneity in economic growth across countries. Most notably, developing oil exporters witnessed negative growth before the pandemic. The protracted low-growth performance has been caused by external shocks (e.g., sluggish global growth, falling oil prices), domestic shocks, and structural impediments to growth. Therefore, economic reforms will be crucial to restoring growth, especially after the Covid-19 crisis.

In recent years, the GCC countries - Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar- have engaged in profound economic reforms (IMF 2016, World Bank 2018). From initial reforms such as spending restraints, efforts are moving to deeper reforms, such as rolling back costly and distortionary energy subsidies, increasing revenues from the non-oil sector, implementing business environment and labor reforms, and public financial management reforms (World Bank 2018). Efforts to understand and support economic reforms in the GCC are much needed.

A key component in ensuring the sustainability of economic reforms is broad participation, engagement, and support for the economic reform process by the population and other domestic and international stakeholders. Broad participation in economic policies could bring many benefits. Broad participation and public deliberation have the potential to aggregate preferences and reshape them through dialogue and argumentation (World Bank, 2017). Examining these norms and preferences and how they evolve is key to understanding why conflicts of interest persist and how reformers can find common ground for socially beneficial reforms (Khemani, 2020). Broad participation and engagement could also increase the contestability of policy ideas. Consequently, reforms could be of higher quality, and efforts could be focused on the most-needed reforms. Available empirical evidence shows that citizen engagement largely improves outcomes at the local level (Baiocchi, 2005; World Bank, 2017). Citizen support can also be instrumental in improving the legitimacy of decisions. The Arab Spring is a powerful reminder of the importance of inclusiveness and public support.

Little has been done to analyze the engagement and support for economic reforms<sup>2</sup> in the GCC. This paper is an effort to fill in the needed gap using novel data from news and social media. The paper contributes to the existing literature on economic reforms, which has typically focused only on the effects of implemented reforms (see Prati et al., 2013, Alesina et al., 2020).

The paper uses text analysis techniques on publicly available big data sources: passed laws and decrees, social media, and news media. The use of data from newspapers and social media platforms has several advantages. They can be real-time and cover many countries. They can provide more granular and

> 2 Economic reforms are understood as changes introduced with the intention to improve the economy. For example, we do not examine political reforms in this paper.

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