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Article: Change and continuity at sixty. (MEED Special Report: Saudi Arabia)
- Article from:
- MEED Middle East Economic Digest
- Article date:
- November 13, 1992
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1992 MEED Middle East Economic Digest. All Rights Reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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SAUDI ARABIA'S diamond jubilee is an opportunity to take stock of the state founded by King Abdel-Aziz in 1932. Economically, it has been transformed beyond recognition. Sixty years ago Riyadh was a remote walled city of no more than 30,000 people, several days hard travel by camel from the nearest coast. Then, there was not a single paved road in the kingdom, and cars were a rarity. Today, the Saudi capital, home to more than 2 million people, is a sprawling modern metropolis, with high-rise housing, fast food outlets and eight-lane expressways complete with traffic jams.
Yet the system of government is largely unchanged from the time the kingdom was created. Its ...