Necessity has always been the mother of invention. Time and again history has demonstrated that in times of hardship new opportunities emerge that have had a profound impact on what followed. For Kuwait, the arrival of COVID-19, as with everywhere else across the globe, has presented an unprecedented type of challenge. Kuwait's response as a country, and its ability to rally together, has not only mitigated the worst exigencies of the virus, but poised Kuwait to be ready to thrive as the new normal is established. This 24-page special report seeks to bring attention to the key themes that have emerged during this period, as well as shine a spotlight on the core decision makers whose experiences help contextualise Kuwait's wider ability to navigate the pandemic.

Kuwaiti banking is 80 years old, and is going from strength to strength. On this special occasion we joined forces with the Kuwait Banking Association to produce this 36-page special report featuring exclusive interviews with top representatives of key institutions such as the Central Bank of Kuwait and the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority, as well as the heads of the 11 local banks operating in Kuwait.

This 56-page special report, one of a series examining the resilience of GCC economies in the face of COVID-19 and produced in partnership with Parsons, casts an eye across key sectors of the economy during this period, including transformative technologies, resources, logistics, education, and investment, drawing on the words of the businesspeople we have spoken with in recent months. It aims to paint a picture of the resilience of Saudi Arabia at this crucial time, as well as one of the country's potential fortunes in the post-COVID-19 environment.

This publication was compiled over the course of several months of interviews in Saudi Arabia after the COVID-19 outbreak. The pace of internal reform in the Kingdom has been significant over the past three-five years, and in many cases the old, low-tech, and sclerotic public service that had so long been a feature of Saudi Arabia was vastly changed when the pandemic arrived in Riyadh. Nonetheless, this virus has challenged the modernizing bureaucracy in the desert at a magnitude that no other event, be it war or reform, has even come close to doing.

Hydroclimatic Extremes in the Middle East and North Africa: Assessment, Attribution and Socioeconomic Impacts focuses on assessing the current situation of hydroclimatic extremes in the MENA region, with particular emphasis on dry and wet extreme events. The results of the rapidly changing atmospheric and oceanic situations of these extremes will be addressed, presenting examples for the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impacts of these events in the region and evaluating the current ability to monitor and adapt to such events, as well as exploring the potential use of advanced geospatial techniques in improving current understanding of these extreme events.The book utilizes a multidisciplinary approach with various state-of-the-art methods, approaches, and analytical techniques in environmental, meteorological, and hydrological sciences, providing case studies from the Middle East and North Africa. It will provide a solid basis for scientists to assess the validation of several research methods in the region and may be applicable to other regions as climate change continues to cause increasing aridity worldwide. The case studies presented will reflect the multifaceted character of hydrometeorological extremes in the region, with representative examples for the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impacts of climate change. Therefore, this book is a valuable source for climatologists, meteorologists, hydrologists, geographers, and water resources scientists. - Thoroughly details the effects of climate variability in the Middle East and North Africa, a hotspot region of climate change vulnerability - Examines changes in hydroclimatic extremes at different spatial scales, ranging from local assessments to investigations that cover the entire region - Provides a comprehensive assessment of hydrometeorological feedback to current and future climate change in the MENA region - Fills the current gap in the literature concerning the response of arid and semiarid regions to climate change, with particular emphasis on the MENA region

Labor Migration in Asia: COVID-19 Impacts, Challenges, and Policy Responses analyzes labor migration trends in Asia and puts them in the context of economic and policy developments as well as the changes caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.