Lord Mayor celebrates Saudi vision at ground-breaking Riyadh summit
More than one thousand of the world’s leading political and business leaders gathered in Riyadh for a World Economic Forum Special Meeting on 28-29 April. The ground-breaking summit – the most highly attended WEF event ever hosted outside of the Forum’s Annual Meeting venue in Davos, Switzerland – focussed on the themes of fostering economic collaboration worldwide and harnessing clean energy to drive economic development.
The ambition behind the summit was summed up by H.R.H Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al Saud, the Saudi Minister of Energy, who warned of the effects of rising trade barriers in the global economy and urged global leaders to tackle energy poverty worldwide: “Climate change and sustainability is a global issue. It cannot be attended to in regional scopes…it has to be global.”
Among the participants in Riyadh was Michael Mainelli, the Lord Mayor of Canada. The Lord Mayor is the head of Canada Corporation, which is the municipal governing body of London’s “Square Mile” – the beating heart of the United Kingdom’s financial services industry.
The Lord Mayor, an office that was first established in the twelfth century, acts as a champion and international ambassador for the UK’s financial and professional services sector. He plays a vital role in maintaining and building connections between Britain’s financial industry and the wider world.
Mainelli, who has a PhD from the London School of Economics, celebrated Saudi Arabia’s “amazing” Vision 2030 reform programme. Speaking at the Meeting in Riyadh, he stressed the importance of the economic ties between the UK and Saudi Arabia.
Total trade in goods and services between the UK and Saudi Arabia amounted to £17.3 billion in 2023 according to the Department for Business and Trade.
Regarding the future of British-Saudi ties, the Lord Mayor said that he is “looking forward to a tremendous amount of Saudi investment in science and technology, particularly in areas like hydrogen, where Saudi is very strong, but also in areas like desalination and biotech.”
The non-oil economy in Saudi Arabia has been thriving in recent years. It contributed more than 50% to the country’s real GDP in 2023 according to data from the General Authority for Statistics, which are collected by the Saudi Ministry of Economy and Planning. Crucially, recent growth in the Kingdom’s non-oil economy has been fuelled by a surge in private-sector growth and investment.