Saudi Arabia Is Winning Portfolio Capital and Losing Direct Investment

Two and a third to one, and rising fast. In 2025 non-residents put $76.1 billion into Saudi bonds, sukuk and shares — 2.3 times the $32.6 billion they committed as direct investment. In the first quarter of 2026 the ratio reached 4.8 to one: $29.9 billion of securities money against $6.2 billion of FDI [S1][S2].

The Saudi Arabia FDI vs portfolio investment split is the most consequential thing the balance of payments says, and almost nobody reports the two series together. Coverage of foreign direct investment tracks the headline inflow; coverage of index inclusion tracks bond and equity flows. Set against each other on the Saudi Central Bank’s own numbers, they describe a country whose external financing has changed character. Portfolio investment supplied 51 per cent of all non-resident capital arriving in 2025 and 66 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, against direct investment’s 22 and 14 per cent [S1].

The direct investment picture is mixed rather than simply bad, and the honest version matters. Gross inward FDI reached $33 billion in 2025 on UNCTAD’s measure, up 51 per cent, lifting Saudi Arabia to 13th in the world from 17th [S3][S4]. That is a real achievement. But the first quarter of 2026 broke the trend: net inflows fell 2.4 per cent year on year to SAR23.1 billion and 51.9 per cent against the previous quarter, while outflows — foreign investors taking money back out — rose 50.6 per cent [S5][S6]. Annualised, the gross run-rate is about $28 billion against a 2030 target of SAR388 billion ($103 billion) [S7].

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

This piece owns the comparison between the two flows, not the FDI number itself: see foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia for the framework, FDI Saudi Arabia 2025 for the annual series, the inbound FDI tracker and FDI-to-GDP gap for the KPI, and the GCC FDI benchmark for the regional table. Those four own the FDI head terms.

What Happened: Two Capital Accounts Moving Opposite Ways

Saudi Arabia’s external position inverted in 2024. The current account swung from a $25.9 billion surplus in 2023 to a $16.3 billion deficit in 2024 and a $32.7 billion deficit in 2025 [S1]. A country running an external deficit must import capital. The question is what kind.

The IMF answered it in the 2025 Article IV consultation, concluded by its Executive Board on 28 July 2025. The current account, it said, had shifted to deficit “increasingly financed by external borrowing and reduced foreign asset accumulation”, with buffers to be maintained through “deposit drawdowns, less FX asset accumulation abroad, and higher external borrowing” [S8]. That is the thesis of this article, written by the institution with access to the books, a year before the data confirmed it.

The scale is larger than the deficit requires. Across the nine quarters from the start of 2024 to March 2026, Saudi Arabia ran a cumulative current account deficit of $44.9 billion while non-residents bought $134.7 billion of Saudi debt securities — three times the external gap [S1]. Saudi issuers raised $49.34 billion across 58 bond and sukuk issuances in the first half of 2026, 48 per cent of all GCC primary issuance, after $47.93 billion in the first half of 2025 [S9][S10]. Fitch put outstanding Saudi debt above $520 billion at end-2025, up 21 per cent in a year [S11]. The sovereign alone raised SAR401 billion in 2025 against a plan of SAR139 billion — a miss of 2.9 times, set out in our analysis of the Saudi sovereign debt trajectory to 2030.

Meanwhile the real economy direct investment is supposed to build went the other way. GASTAT’s flash estimate on 30 July 2026 showed real GDP contracting 4.8 per cent year on year with non-oil activity growing 0.6 per cent [S12], and national non-oil exports fell 27.3 per cent in May 2026 [S13][S14].

Saudi Arabia FDI vs Portfolio Investment: The Two Series

This is the table the coverage is missing. Both columns are net incurrence of liabilities from the Saudi Central Bank’s balance of payments — money non-residents actually put in, on one consistent basis, in the currency SAMA publishes [S1].

Annual figures are the sum of SAMA’s four published quarters. The FDI column is SAMA’s direct-investment liabilities line, which the central bank reconciles exactly to GASTAT’s net FDI inflow — SAR23,086m for Q1 2026. The equity column matches the World Bank’s independently compiled portfolio-equity series to within $30 million in every year tested, which is a useful check that both are reading the same underlying data [S15].

Four readings follow, and the third is the one that changes the argument.

The ratio has quadrupled in three years. From 1.1 to one in 2023, to 2.1 in 2024, 2.3 in 2025 and 4.8 in the first quarter of 2026. This is not a level; it is a trend, and it is accelerating in the direction that matters least for the transformation.

It is a debt story, not an equity story. Of 2025’s $76.1 billion, $69.6 billion — 91 per cent — was debt securities. Foreign equity buying has been almost flat at $4 billion to $7 billion a year since 2021. The portfolio boom is bond investors buying paper the Kingdom is printing, not equity investors buying into Saudi growth.

The stock crossed over in 2020 and the gap is now $92 billion. This is the finding that no published analysis states. On SAMA’s International Investment Position, the stock of foreign portfolio claims on Saudi Arabia passed the stock of inward direct investment in 2020 and has pulled away since: $391.3 billion against $299.4 billion at March 2026 [S1]. Saudi Arabia’s largest external liability is no longer the businesses foreigners have built there. It is the paper they hold.

The 2019 comparison flatters nothing. The ratio was 15.5 to one then, higher than today — but for the opposite reason: direct investment was almost nil at $3.1 billion, and portfolio inflows were $22.5 billion of equity as MSCI and FTSE inclusion landed. That was a market being opened. 2025 is a market being tapped.

What is the difference between FDI and portfolio investment?

Direct investment buys control; portfolio investment buys a claim. GASTAT’s definition of FDI requires a “long-term relationship” in which the foreign investor holds 10 per cent or more of voting equity, enough to influence decision-making [S5]. Anything below that threshold, plus all bonds and sukuk, is portfolio investment.

The statistical line is technical. The economic difference is not.

A fund in Frankfurt that buys Saudi sukuk transfers money to Riyadh and receives a coupon. Nothing is built, nobody is hired, no process knowledge crosses a border. A German industrial group that opens a plant in Jubail transfers a smaller sum and brings engineers, suppliers, training and an export relationship. Vision 2030’s target is written in FDI terms precisely because the second thing is what the programme is for. Access to each channel is covered in our guides to investing in Saudi bonds and the Saudi sukuk market.

One definition that is routinely misreported

GASTAT’s “FDI outflows” line — the one that rose 50.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 — does not measure Saudi investment abroad. GASTAT defines it as transactions “reducing liability aspects, such as through the payment of dividends, payment of loans, settlement of creditor dues, or when a direct foreign investor exits” [S5]. It is foreign investors taking money out of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia’s own outward direct investment is a separate SAMA line, and it also rose about 50 per cent in the quarter — to SAR29.5 billion ($7.9 billion) from $5.2 billion a year earlier [S1]. Two different series, both up roughly half, routinely conflated in coverage that attributes the FDI slowdown to PIF deploying abroad. PIF’s outward deployment is real and large, but it is not what the GASTAT outflow number counts. Both facts point the same way: more money is leaving through the direct channel, from both directions.

Is Saudi Arabia meeting its $100bn FDI target?

No, and 2025 looks like the first year the trajectory was missed. The National Investment Strategy targets FDI inflows of SAR388 billion (about $103 billion) — 5.7 per cent of GDP — by 2030, alongside gross fixed capital formation at 30 per cent of GDP [S16].

How much FDI does Saudi Arabia attract?

Roughly $28 billion a year on the current run-rate, or $33 billion on the best outturn. Gross inward FDI was SAR26.6 billion ($7.1 billion) in the first quarter of 2026 and net SAR23.1 billion; UNCTAD recorded $33 billion for full-year 2025 [S3][S5]. Against a 2030 requirement near $103 billion, inflows need to roughly triple.

The strategy carries an annual path, and until recently Saudi Arabia was beating it. MISA’s monitor records inflows of SAR119 billion in 2024 against a SAR109 billion target — a fourth consecutive year ahead [S16]. Summing GASTAT’s latest revised quarters gives SAR135.9 billion for 2025 against a SAR140 billion target, roughly 3 per cent short. That calculation is ours: GASTAT published no annual 2025 FDI report.

MISA’s own charts contain a second caution. The 2021 and 2022 totals were inflated by one-off Aramco pipeline transactions — SAR73 billion of 2021’s SAR122 billion and SAR55 billion of 2022’s SAR119 billion [S16]. Strip them and the organic base is far lower than the headline series implies, which makes the 2030 slope steeper than it looks.

The institutional signal is worth more than the arithmetic. On 12 February 2026 a royal decree made Fahad bin Abduljalil Al-Saif Minister of Investment in place of Khalid Al-Falih. Al-Saif is a PIF financier and the founding chief of the National Debt Management Center — the man who built the machine that sells Saudi Arabia’s bonds to foreigners now owns the target for attracting factories, as our profile of Saudi Arabia’s investment minister sets out. Read alongside the two series, it is hard not to see a state that has become better at the financing problem than the development one.

Why are foreigners buying Saudi bonds?

Principally because Saudi Arabia is selling them. This is a supply-driven story and it should be said plainly. A sovereign that raises $49.34 billion in six months [S9] will find buyers at some price, and one rated A+ by S&P, A+ by Fitch and Aa3 by Moody’s — all affirmed with stable outlooks during the 2026 disruption — finds them at a good one, as our page on the Saudi Arabia credit rating records.

Index inclusion converts that supply into automatic demand. Five decisions have done the work, and the fifth is not yet in the data.

The two bond decisions matter most and are the least covered. FTSE Russell’s EMGBI inclusion in 2022 admitted local-currency Saudi government sukuk to a global benchmark after the Kingdom’s accessibility level was upgraded from “0” to “1”; the Ministry of Finance said it reflected efforts “to develop, deepen, and enhance the efficiency of the local debt market” [S20]. A 2.75 per cent weight is a mechanical purchase order for every passive fund tracking the index.

The GBI-EM decision, announced by the Ministry of Finance on 23 April 2026 and confirmed by Finance Minister Mohammed Aljadaan, is larger still: phased inclusion from 29 January 2027 at an expected 2.52 per cent weight, covering eight riyal sukuk worth roughly $69 billion [S21]. Saudi local-currency debt also joins the Bloomberg Emerging Market Local Currency Government Index from the April 2027 rebalancing. None of that demand has arrived yet: the $76.1 billion of 2025 inflows was recorded before the largest index event in the Kingdom’s local-debt history.

Equity tells a smaller story. On 6 January 2026 the Capital Market Authority opened the Main Market to all categories of foreign investor, effective 1 February 2026, retiring the Qualified Foreign Investor regime that had required at least SAR1.875 billion in assets [S22]. MSCI’s Raman Subramanian, Managing Director and Head of Index Regional Research Solutions, said in April 2025 that inclusion had “contributed to increasing its weight to more than 4%, compared to 1% at the start of its inclusion in 2019” [S23]. He was right then; the weight has since roughly halved to about 2.4 per cent, because TASI fell 12.84 per cent in 2025 while emerging markets rose sharply [S17]. Foreign ownership of the exchange stood at SAR455.9 billion on 14 June 2026 — 4.67 per cent of market capitalisation [S24], and net foreign buying, though positive every year, was SAR20.7 billion in 2025 against SAR91.2 billion in 2019. Market structure is covered in our analysis of the Tadawul stock exchange and the institutional profile of Tadawul.

Why is direct investment not arriving?

Because the gross number and the net number measure different things, and the net number has stalled. Four mechanisms are visible in the published record.

Repatriation is rising. GASTAT’s outflow line — foreign investors withdrawing capital, paying down loans or exiting — rose 50.6 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2026 to SAR3.5 billion, and reached SAR39 billion across 2024 against SAR119 billion of inflows [S5][S6]. Nearly a third of gross inward FDI now leaves again in the same period.

Concentration in a few very large commitments. Gross FDI that rises 51 per cent in a year [S3] and then falls 49.9 per cent quarter on quarter is not describing a broad base of medium-sized investors. It is describing a handful of large transactions whose timing dominates the series — and MISA’s own decomposition confirms it, with Aramco pipeline deals supplying 60 per cent of 2021 inflows [S16].

The regional headquarters programme measures presence, not capital. More than 780 international firms held RHQ status by the first quarter of 2026 against an original target of 480 by 2030 — cleared six years early. But the qualifying threshold is 15 employees including three executives, which across 780 licences mandates roughly 11,700 jobs in an economy with a labour force in the tens of millions, and MISA publishes the licence count rather than headcount, payroll or operational status. Our guide to the regional headquarters programme sets out what the evidence supports; what the Riyadh mandate actually changed covers the effect on the city. The programme succeeded at relocating decision-making authority. It was never an FDI instrument, and reading it as one overstates the direct investment story.

Giga-project rescoping removes the pipeline. FDI into Saudi Arabia has been disproportionately project-linked, and the projects are being resized. Our analysis of the NEOM contract cancellation cost documents the expense of exiting commitments; PIF’s 2025 accounts recorded a SAR64.7 billion comprehensive loss attributable to the owner, examined in our reading of the PIF 2025 results. A contractor that is not being paid to build a city is not a foreign direct investor in it.

The growth-capital layer says the same one tier down. Venture funding fell 74 per cent in the first half of 2026, and while roughly 65 per cent of that is a base effect from two 2025 mega-rounds, Series B and Series C recorded zero rounds — see Saudi venture funding fell 74 per cent.

Is portfolio capital a risk for Saudi Arabia?

It is a different risk, and not currently an acute one. The strongest version of the counter-argument deserves stating properly, because it is largely correct.

The case that this is exactly what Vision 2030 wanted

Deep, liquid capital markets are themselves a Vision 2030 objective, not a consolation prize. Index inclusion took a decade of market-infrastructure work — settlement, custody, disclosure, foreign-ownership reform — and is not reversible by sentiment alone. Saudi Arabia is now the largest emerging-market dollar debt and sukuk issuer [S11], with a debt-to-GDP ratio near 33.6 per cent, below the UAE, Qatar, Oman and every G7 economy. A country that can borrow $11.5 billion on a $31 billion order book, as it did in January 2026, has an asset rather than a problem.

The buffers are real too. SAMA’s net foreign assets stood at $437 billion at end-2025 [S25] and reserve assets rose to $496.6 billion by March 2026 — up $36 billion in a quarter, during the war. Our riyal peg stress test works through why the peg held; SAMA’s institutional profile covers the reserve function. Borrowing cheaply in size against a large asset base is a strategy many developed sovereigns run permanently.

Where the case weakens

Duration mismatch. Portfolio liabilities behave as short and callable even when long in contract; the assets they finance — cities, rail, industrial capacity — are twenty-year projects with uncertain returns. The IMF projects Saudi external debt at 34.8 per cent of GDP in 2025 rising to 38.1 per cent in 2026 [S8]. That is not a distress level. It is a fast-moving one.

The foreign share of domestic debt is doubling. Fitch estimated non-residents at 4.5 per cent of the local-issuance investor base in 2024 and above 10 per cent of outstanding direct domestic issuance at end-2025 [S11]. The riyal sukuk market was built as a domestic bank market. It is becoming an international one, and GBI-EM inclusion in January 2027 will accelerate that by design.

The flows are procyclical in the wrong direction. Index-driven money arrives on an upgrade and leaves on a downgrade, and it does not care what the money was spent on. Direct investment, once sunk, cannot be repriced weekly. In 2016 the same class of investor tested the riyal to 1,020-point forwards; the exposure today is larger and more benchmarked.

Nothing in the portfolio channel touches the diversification KPIs. This is decisive. Non-oil exports fell 27.3 per cent year on year in May 2026 [S13]; non-oil GDP grew 0.6 per cent in the second quarter [S12]; SME contribution sits at 22.9 per cent against a 35 per cent target. Not one is improved by a foreigner buying a sukuk. They are improved by factories, and factories arrive through the channel that has stalled.

A country funding itself with portfolio inflows while direct investment stalls has substituted a financing strategy for a development strategy. Both are competent. They are not the same thing, and only one of them was the plan.

How does Saudi Arabia compare with the UAE and Qatar?

The UAE attracts substantially more direct investment; Qatar attracts almost none. On UNCTAD’s 2025 figures the UAE took $48 billion to Saudi Arabia’s $33 billion, ranking 9th globally against Saudi Arabia’s 13th [S3][S4].

Two caveats. The World Bank series carries no portfolio equity data for the UAE at all across 2022 to 2025, so the two-series comparison performed here for Saudi Arabia cannot be reproduced for its main competitor — a limitation of the published data, not a finding. And UNCTAD and SAMA figures use different vintages and adjustments, so the columns should be read down, not across.

The comparison still lands. West Asian FDI rose 20 per cent to almost $111 billion in 2025 against global growth of 6 per cent to $1.62 trillion [S3] — a regional boom in which Saudi Arabia took the second-largest share while its portfolio account did more than twice the work. The Gulf comparison runs further in the GCC FDI benchmark, the Saudi Arabia versus UAE scoreboard and the GCC stock exchanges benchmark.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Vision 2030 set an FDI target rather than a capital-inflow target for a reason. Its authors wanted technology, employment, supply chains and management capability — things that arrive attached to a factory and cannot be bought at a bond auction. The FDI investment priority is written in those terms.

The balance of payments describes a state that has become extremely good at raising money and no better at attracting builders. Both capabilities are valuable. Only one closes the gaps Vision 2030 measures itself against: non-oil exports 27.3 per cent below last year [S13], non-oil GDP growth of 0.6 per cent [S12], a venture market with no Series B rounds [S26]. Portfolio capital funds the deficit that pays for the programme. It does not execute the programme.

The uncomfortable version is that the two series may be causally linked. Heavy sovereign issuance absorbs domestic bank balance-sheet capacity and sets a high risk-free rate against which private industrial projects must clear — a state borrowing at scale competing with the private investment it is trying to attract. That mechanism is documented elsewhere and is not established in Saudi data, but nothing in the published record rules it out and no institution has tested it.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

Annual figures in the two-series table are summed, not published. SAMA publishes balance-of-payments flows quarterly; the annual rows are the sum of four quarters. The same applies to the SAR135.9 billion FDI figure for 2025 — GASTAT published no annual 2025 FDI report, so that number is derived.

The 2025 target miss is our calculation. MISA has not published a 2025 outturn against its own trajectory, and the SAR140 billion target is read from a chart in its Economic and Investment Monitor rather than a numeric table. Treat the ~3 per cent shortfall as indicative.

Non-resident holdings of Saudi government debt are still not officially published. Neither the NDMC nor SAMA discloses the share held outside the Kingdom. The 4.5 per cent and “above 10 per cent” figures are Fitch estimates, not disclosures. That number would settle how exposed the sovereign is to a portfolio reversal, and it remains the largest gap in this argument.

MSCI’s current Saudi weight is derived. MSCI does not publish a standalone country weight; the ~2.4 per cent figure is the Saudi index market value divided by the EM index market value from the two June 2026 factsheets. FTSE’s 3.20 per cent is published directly.

Retrieval was blocked at several primary sources — the Saudi Exchange, the IMF’s press-release pages, UNCTAD and the Saudi Press Agency. Where that happened, figures come from official mirrors and from the outlets that read the primary documents, cited as such. SAMA’s monthly bulletin and the Ministry of Finance releases were retrieved directly.

UNCTAD and GASTAT disagree about the shape of 2025 and 2026. UNCTAD reports a 51 per cent rise; GASTAT’s quarterly series shows a 49.9 per cent quarter-on-quarter fall into 2026. Both are probably right about their own periods; anyone citing only one is describing half the year.

The UAE comparison is incomplete by construction, since portfolio equity data for the Emirates is absent from the World Bank series across the whole window. And the crowding-out mechanism above is not established — a hypothesis, not a measured finding.

What to Watch Next

1. SAMA’s balance of payments for Q2 2026, in the monthly bulletin. Q1’s 4.8-to-one ratio is one quarter. A second above four turns a trend into a regime.
2. GBI-EM phasing from 29 January 2027. A 2.52 per cent weight against roughly $200 billion of index-tracking assets implies billions of mechanical local-currency demand [S21]. The interesting number is what happens to the ratio when it lands.
3. GASTAT’s Q2 2026 FDI bulletin, due around late September. Q1 gross was SAR26.6 billion; a second quarter below SAR30 billion makes the $28 billion annualised run-rate the working figure for the year.
4. Whether MISA publishes a 2025 annual FDI outturn against its own trajectory. Silence would itself be informative after four years of publicising the beat.
5. The IMF’s 2026 Article IV staff report. The Ministry of Finance welcomed it on 29 July 2026 [S25]; the full document will carry the first post-conflict external-financing projection from an institution that shows its workings.
6. Any Saudi disclosure of non-resident debt holdings. The absence is the finding; publication would move the analysis materially in either direction.
7. FTSE Russell’s WGBI review on 6 October 2026. Saudi Arabia is not on the watch list and needs accessibility level 2, holding level 1. Promotion would be the next large passive-demand event.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia — policy and framework
• Inbound FDI tracker and the FDI-to-GDP gap — the Vision 2030 KPI
• GCC FDI benchmark — the regional league table
• Saudi Arabia’s debt trajectory to 2030 — the issuance programme behind the inflow
• The regional headquarters programme — licences and what they do not measure
• Saudi venture funding fell 74 per cent — the growth-capital layer
• Saudi Arabia’s non-oil exports — what portfolio capital does not touch
• The 2026 GDP forecaster split — the growth backdrop

Sources

• [S1] Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), Monthly Statistical Bulletin June 2026 — External Sector, Table 2 Balance of Payments and Table 3 International Investment Position, statistical release, 30 July 2026. https://www.sama.gov.sa/en-US/Statistics/MonthlyStatistics/Monthly_Bulletin_Jun_2026.xlsx
• [S2] Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), Monthly Statistics index page, statistical portal, retrieved 31 July 2026. https://www.sama.gov.sa/en-US/Statistics/Pages/MonthlyStatistics.aspx
• [S3] UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2026: International Investment in a Turbulent Era, annual report, July 2026. https://unctad.org/publication/world-investment-report-2026-international-investment-turbulent-era
• [S4] Arab News, Saudi Arabia Jumps to 13th Place Globally in Attracting FDI, report on the UNCTAD World Investment Report 2026, 7 July 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2649956/business-economy
• [S5] General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), Foreign Direct Investment Quarter 1 2026 (June 2026) and Foreign Direct Investment 2024 (annual), statistical bulletins. https://www.stats.gov.sa/documents/20117/2435267/Foreign+Direct+Investment%2C+Quarter+1+2026+-EN.pdf and https://www.stats.gov.sa/documents/20117/2435267/Foreign_Direct_Investment_2024_EN.pdf
• [S6] Arab News, Saudi FDI Inflows Rise 2.4% YoY in Q1, report on the GASTAT bulletin, 30 June 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2649113/business-economy
• [S7] Saudi Gazette, Net FDI Inflows Drop 2.4% to SR23 Billion in Q1 2026, GASTAT data report, June 2026. https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/662626/saudi-arabia/net-fdi-inflows-drop-24-to-sr23-billion-in-q1-2026
• [S8] International Monetary Fund, IMF Executive Board Concludes 2025 Article IV Consultation with Saudi Arabia, press release for Country Report No. 25/223, Board concluded 28 July 2025, published 3 August 2025, as reproduced by Mirage News. https://www.miragenews.com/imf-wraps-up-2025-saudi-arabia-article-iv-review-1508682/
• [S9] Arab News, Saudi Arabia Raises $49bn in H1 Debt Issuance, Leads GCC Market: Markaz, market report, July 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2652343/business-economy
• [S10] Arab News, Saudi Arabia Tops GCC Debt Market With $47.9bn in H1 Issuances: Markaz, market report, 4 August 2025. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2610616/business-economy
• [S11] Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s Debt Capital Market to Hit $600bn by End-2026, Up 15% — Fitch, ratings-agency report, 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2630643/business-economy
• [S12] General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), GDP Flash Estimates Q2 2026, statistical release, 30 July 2026. https://www.stats.gov.sa/documents/20117/2435267/GDP+Flash+Q2.2026EN.pdf
• [S13] Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s Trade Surplus Jumps to $6.9bn in May as Oil Exports Rebound, report on GASTAT international trade statistics, July 2026. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2652334/business-economy
• [S14] Zawya, Saudi Merchandise Exports Rise 3.9% as Trade Surplus Surges 328.8%, GASTAT trade data report, July 2026. https://www.zawya.com/en/economy/saudi-merchandise-exports-rise-3.9-as-trade-surplus-surges-328.8-409837
• [S15] World Bank, Foreign Direct Investment Net Inflows and Portfolio Equity Net Inflows (BoP, Current US$) for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, compiled from IMF Balance of Payments Statistics, retrieved 31 July 2026. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?locations=SA
• [S16] Ministry of Investment of Saudi Arabia (MISA), Economic and Investment Monitor Q3 2025, quarterly report, 2025. https://misa.gov.sa/en/reports/
• [S17] MSCI, MSCI Saudi Arabia Index and MSCI Emerging Markets Index factsheets, 30 June 2026. https://www.msci.com/indexes/index/2670
• [S18] LSEG/FTSE Russell, FTSE Emerging Index Factsheet, 30 June 2026, and FTSE Saudi Arabia Country Classification FAQ. https://www.lseg.com/content/dam/ftse-russell/en_us/documents/country-classification/ftse-faq-document-saudi-arabia.pdf
• [S19] Marmore MENA Intelligence, GCC’s Inclusion in J.P. Morgan’s EM Bond Index, research note on EMBI Global Diversified weightings, 2019. https://www.marmoremena.com/en/insights/gccs-inclusion-in-j-p-morgans-em-bond-index-the-hurray-moment/
• [S20] Ministry of Finance and National Debt Management Center, Saudi Arabian Government SAR-Denominated Sukuk Included in FTSE Emerging Markets Government Bond Index, official announcement, 30 September 2021. https://www.mof.gov.sa/en/MediaCenter/news/Pages/news2102021.aspx
• [S21] Ministry of Finance, Saudi Arabia’s Riyal-Denominated Sukuk to Join the J.P. Morgan GBI-EM Index, official announcement quoting Minister Mohammed Aljadaan, 23 April 2026. https://www.mof.gov.sa/en/MediaCenter/news/Pages/News_23042026.aspx
• [S22] Capital Market Authority, The CMA Opens the Capital Market to All Categories of Foreign Investors, official announcement, 6 January 2026. https://cma.gov.sa/en/MediaCenter/NEWS/Pages/CMA_N_3974.aspx
• [S23] Argaam, Saudi Market Weight Rises to 4% in Emerging Markets Index: MSCI, market report quoting Raman Subramanian, 16 April 2025. https://www.argaam.com/en/article/articledetail/id/1805427
• [S24] Saudi Tadawul Group, Foreign Investor Ownership and Trading Report, exchange statistics as at 14 June 2026, as reproduced by Argaam. https://www.tadawulgroup.sa
• [S25] Ministry of Finance, Saudi Ministry of Finance Welcomes 2026 IMF Article IV Consultation Report, official release, 29 July 2026. https://www.mof.gov.sa/en/MediaCenter/news/Pages/News_29072026.aspx
• [S26] Enterprise MENA (KSA edition), Saudi Venture Market Emerges Smaller, More Local in 1H 2026, news analysis of MAGNiTT data, 30 July 2026. https://enterpriseam.com/ksa/2026/07/30/saudi-venture-market-emerges-smaller-more-local-in-1h-2026/

SAMA’s Monthly Statistical Bulletin for June 2026 is the primary source for the two-series table, the International Investment Position and the current account. Balance-of-payments dollar figures are SAMA’s own published US dollar series; International Investment Position figures are published in riyals and converted at the pegged SAR3.75. Annual flow figures are the sum of SAMA’s four published quarters. The Saudi Exchange, the IMF’s press-release pages, UNCTAD and the Saudi Press Agency blocked automated retrieval; where that occurred, figures are attributed to the official mirrors and to the outlets that read the primary documents.