BIS Review 128/2010  3  Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques The endorsement of the Ninth Development plan coincided with the announcement by the Central Department of Statistics and Information of preliminary results of the population census. The population of the Kingdom amounted to 27.1 million, of whom about 18.7 million are Saudis, and 8.4 million are residents. The number of houses stood at 4.6 million. These results support your Royal instructions to exert every effort to achieve the objectives of the Ninth Development Plan in a timely manner, especially with regard to enhancing citizens’ welfare, providing housing, employment, education, health care services, and modern facilities needed, and working hard to fight poverty, paying special attention to balanced development in all regions of the Kingdom. At the regional level, the four member states of the GCC Monetary Union (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait) have ratified, at the beginning of this year, the convention of the Monetary Union. By your Royal encouragement and support and that of your brothers the leaders of the Council’s states, the Monetary Council began its work as the nucleus of the central bank to be established upon the completion of the main facilities and infrastructure of the Monetary Union. The central banks and monetary agencies, members of the Monetary Council, are doing their utmost to conduct the Council’s work in accordance with the guidance of the leaders of the Council’s States. In spite of these bright achievements, there are still many challenges posed to our development march.

G20 has set a comprehensive work program to enhance the global financial system, including the establishment of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) in April 2009, attaining significant progress in the regulatory area and capital adequacy standards, liquidity risk management, compensation rules for senior executives in the financial sector, and transparency in registering hedge funds and rating agencies. Hopefully, the application of these standards would enhance significantly the financial positions of global institutions in the coming years. With this background, the Saudi economy has not been affected considerably by the global financial crisis due to conservative and prudent oversight and control policies followed since a long time. For instance, attention is paid to capital adequacy ratios and loan provisions for countercyclicalities. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Under Your ongoing patronage and follow-up, the Supreme Economic Counsel continued achieving many developmental steps aiming at reconstructing and organizing the economy and updating laws and legislation in order to promote the level of the economy’s efficiency and competitiveness, support the optimum utilization of production factors, and provide sophisticated regulatory and administrative frameworks and an attractive environment to domestic and foreign investments. As a result of these efforts, the economic performance has improved greatly over the recent years. This has been highlighted by the growth of the private sector’s real GDP by an annual average of 5.1 percent during the last five years and the increase in non-oil exports by an average of 14.6 percent during the same period.