Aristotle

The notion of “rentier mentality” has dominated the literature on the Gulf States for almost 40 years now. In 1987, Luciani and Beblawi defined it as a “break in the work-reward causation. Reward – income or wealth – is not related to work and risk bearing, rather to chance or situation.” (Beblawi/Luciani 1987: 52) It is one of those concepts that are often mentioned in a very cursory way. As a “mentality” it seems to belong to the realm of psychology and the political scientist or economist carefully avoids potential blunders of “culturalist” judgments on entire societies. And indeed, rentier mentality has nothing that makes it special to Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim societies. In the Gulf States in particular, conditions of life before oil used to be very harsh and without hard work, nobody could have survived. It is rather a matter of incentives when people with considerable rentier income are prone to low work motivation. This mechanism is likely to work anywhere in the world.

However, rentier mentality has turned out to be very tenacious in the Gulf States and it persists despite governmental policies to change it. Although the rapidly growing population of the Gulf states should lead to a rising awareness that, in the future, governments will no more be able to provide a living for all citizens, the individual pressure to earn one's own living does not seem to have increased. But is this really so?

While it seems to be a mentality only, rentier mentality has also given rise to and nourished structures and mechanisms in businesses and administration that suited this mentality best. Governments have added their share by their reluctance to abolish privileges for citizens and by even expanding them in times of political instability, as happened following on from the events of the so called Arab Spring in 2011. With rentier income pouring in, especially during the period of relatively high oil prices from 2002- 2014, the resulting inefficiencies were affordable and inefficient processes have become deeply ingrained in daily routines of enterprises and administrations. In about the same vein, traditional structures and behaviours that a process of economic development would have changed elsewhere can be sustained longer than in resource-poor countries.