author - oman observer

The world is witnessing a profound reshaping of trade, energy and supply chains. Maritime routes are no longer merely passages for ships and goods; they have become integral to global economic...

Every generation inherits an anxiety about work. Ours has two: machines that learn faster than we do, and a planet that warms faster than we act. Yet buried inside this double worry is the most...

Half a century ago, Oman struck oil and bought itself a future. Today a second discovery is under way not beneath the desert, but inside our institutions, our enterprises and our people. Artificial...

The Horn of Africa is almost always introduced to the world through the vocabulary of crisis: conflict, drought, piracy, fragile states. The framing is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete....

Some visits mark a date on the calendar; others open a chapter in a nation’s economic story. The state visit of His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik to France on June 29 belongs firmly to the second...

The diplomatic milestone has rightly been celebrated. The GCC–UK Free Trade Agreement — the first comprehensive pact between the Gulf Cooperation Council and a G7 economy — was concluded this...

Every few weeks I sit across from a manufacturer in Suhar, Rusayl or Al Duqm who treats In-Country Value (ICV) the way one treats a tax audit — as a cost to be minimised, a box to be ticked, a...

A major, yet unheralded, logistics deal in June 2026 has successfully bridged the gap between the Central Asian steppe and the Arabian Sea. By acquiring a controlling stake in Uzbekistan’s Universal...

Every so often two countries look across a map and recognise in each other not a rival but a missing half. When Oman and Kazakhstan signed a framework agreement in Astana this spring to establish a...

On June 1, 2026, the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between India and Oman enters into force. Signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s December visit to Muscat and since...

On April 30, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik signed Royal Decree 50/2026, establishing a Special Economic Zone for artificial intelligence in the governorate of Muscat. The decree itself is...

On May 12, in a glass-and-steel building overlooking Mina Al Fahal, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik unveiled a plaque. The building is Bait Al Haitham — the "House of Haitham" — and it is far...

Every few decades, the global economy reorders itself and the countries that read the moment correctly emerge with positions they could not have secured at any price. The current reordering — driven...

There is a quiet revolution taking place on the tarmac. While the world debates tariffs and trade wars, a different kind of economic architecture is emerging in the shadows of airport terminals; one...

Few relationships in the Indian Ocean economy carry the quiet depth of the one between Oman and Tanzania. Centuries before containers and free-trade agreements, dhows sailed from Sur and Suhar on the...

There are moments in a country’s economic journey when numbers stop being mere statistics and start becoming signals of structural change. Oman’s special economic zones, free zones and industrial...

The World Bank’s April 2026 Economic Update for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan arrives at a moment of acute uncertainty. A conflict centred around the Gulf has effectively...

India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 and Oman Vision 2040 are not identical projects, but they are unusually compatible. India’s ambition is to become a developed nation by the centenary of its...

Oman’s development story over the past five decades is, by any reasonable measure, a remarkable one. A country that in 1970 had fewer than ten kilometres of paved road has built a modern state with...

There is a quiet revolution underway along the Sultanate of Oman’s land borders. It does not involve speeches or summits alone—it is being built with asphalt, concrete, and cross-border customs...