A Data-Driven Assessment of Arab Gulf Economic Vulnerability Amid the 2026 War

Elmekdad Shehab

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Between February and April 2026, a joint American-Israeli air campaign against Iran drew retaliatory strikes across the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. Global commentary settled quickly into a familiar frame, asking what the disruption meant for oil prices, shipping routes, and world supply chains. The question of what it meant for the Gulf itself, for its sixty million people and the trajectory of its development model, received far less attention. This monograph asks what the war revealed about the structure of the Gulf economy and where vulnerability proved greatest. It applies the Vulnerability Assessment Framework, a three- dimensional analytical tool rooted in the IPCC tradition and extended to economic systems by Briguglio et al. (2009) and Guillaumont (2010), to three foundational sectors: energy, food, and water. Across each, the framework decomposes vulnerability into exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Two patterns emerge, one sectoral and one systemic. At the sectoral level, exposure is uniformly high across all three sectors. Sensitivity varies with the time each sector grants for a response, lowest in energy and highest in water. Adaptive capacity moves in the opposite direction: strongest where urgency is least, weakest where it is greatest. At the systemic level, the analysis argues that Gulf diversification ambitions are geographically constrained. Despite two decades of effort, the economic tracks built to move beyond hydrocarbons, namely finance, tourism, aviation, and digital infrastructure, rest on the same foundational geography as the hydrocarbon model itself. What the war revealed is the need for a reframing of the challenge ahead away from the familiar question of how to move beyond oil and gas, and toward a harder one. How does a state build what this study terms a geographically hedged economy, one whose resilience does not depend on the stability of the very geography it cannot leave?

Keywords: Gulf economies; economic vulnerability; GCC; Strait of Hormuz; energy security; food security; water security; Iran; vulnerability assessment framework; economic diversification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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