Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia: Large Reserves, Heavy Defense Spending, Low Democracy Scores

Saudi Arabia's economy was valued at $1.24 trillion in 2024, per the World Bank's WDI figures, with GDP per capita of $35,122 and a population of 35.3 million the same year. Government debt is projected at a comparatively low 32.1 percent of GDP in 2026, per the IMF's World Economic Outlook, well below the ratios recorded for several other states in this briefing series. Reserves stood at $459.8 billion in 2025, per the IMF's International Financial Statistics, among the larger reserve positions in this set and a sum well in excess of the country's projected debt burden relative to GDP.

Military Capacity

Military spending reached $83.18 billion in 2025, equal to 6.482 percent of GDP, per SIPRI's 2025 figures — one of the highest spending-to-GDP ratios in this set. SIPRI computes that ratio against its own GDP series, not the World Bank's $1.24 trillion figure cited above, and the two should not be combined. Active personnel totaled 257,000 in 2022, per the Correlates of War National Material Capabilities (COW NMC) dataset, which also lists a composite index of national capability (CINC) of 0.0134 for that year — the largest active-personnel figure among the Gulf and Asian states reviewed in this series. No nuclear-weapons figure is present in the supplied data.

Governance

V-Dem's 2025 figures (v15) score Saudi Arabia's electoral democracy at 0.016 and liberal democracy at 0.047 — among the lowest values for any metric in this briefing set — while state capacity is scored at 0.396, indicating constrained administrative reach relative to the country's wealth. The gap between the near-zero democracy scores and the mid-range state-capacity figure suggests an administrative apparatus capable of executing policy without the electoral or liberal constraints V-Dem measures. That state-capacity score, while higher than the democracy indices, still sits below the figures recorded for the wealthier European states in this briefing series, despite Saudi Arabia's large reserves and low government debt.

Energy

Saudi Arabia's primary energy consumption was 11.85 exajoules in 2024, and it generated 454.64 terawatt-hours of electricity the same year, per Our World in Data. Oil production reached 5,933.3 TWh and gas production 1,214.8 TWh, both for 2024 — combined hydrocarbon output more than fifteen times the country's own electricity generation figure, consistent with a dominant export-oriented hydrocarbon producer, though no export breakdown or multi-year trend was supplied for comparison.

Sources: World Bank WDI; IMF WEO; IMF IFS; SIPRI Milex; COW NMC; V-Dem v15; Our World in Data (Energy)