This talk will present Dr. Abouzzohour’s ongoing research on tax reform in the resource-wealthy Gulf monarchies. Amid increasing economic pressures, some Gulf states have introduced value-added taxes (VAT) to raise cash and diversify their fiscal revenue streams. Implementing any tax presents the challenge of raising cash to meet public spending needs and promoting economic growth while minimizing resistance and ensuring political stability. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the Gulf, where states are perceived as historically tax-free environments. However, this topic remains largely unexplored in academic literature.

Taking Saudi Arabia as its primary case, this study builds on macroeconomic and public opinion data to investigate the economic and societal impact of newly introduced taxes on rentier economies and politics. This project’s findings contribute to the taxation-democracy debate in political economy by exploring tax reform in a scarcely studied, closed context. They further our understanding of the process of renegotiation of the social contract in shifting rentier states as oil and gas lose their dominance. Finally, they draw out lessons for other rentier states.

Dr. Yasmina Abouzzohour is an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at the Institute for the Transregional Study at Princeton University. Her research centers on the systematic study of how military and state-society relations evolve across regime types, with particular emphasis on Arab monarchies and Maghreb states.

Dr. Abouzzohour’s work has received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Andrew Mellon Fund, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Project on Middle East Political Science, among others. She has published in academic journals such as the Middle East Journal and the Journal of North African Studies and has contributed to edited volumes, including “The Gulf Cooperation Council at Forty” and “Foreign Policy in North Africa.” She has been featured in various media outlets, including BBC World, Washington Post, L’Orient-Le Jour, Akhbar Al Yaoum, Al Jazeera, and Financial Times.

Prior to joining Princeton, Dr. Abouzzohour served as a Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Oxford.