Academic: 54 billion riyals, the value of public endowments in the Kingdom
Dr. Muhammad Al-Suhaibani, a faculty member at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University, said that endowment institutions represent the backbone of the non-profit sector in the Kingdom, where the endowment sector contributes, along with the two main sectors in the public and private economies, to the gross domestic product.
During the meeting, organized by the Asharqia Chamber represented by the Endowments Committee on Wednesday evening, September 29, 2021, and administered by Salah Al-Zamil, Al-Suhaibani explained that the endowment sector seeks to provide public services that the state aims to achieve with resources transferred voluntarily from the private sector, and Dr. Al-Suhaibani indicated that the non-profit sector contributes to achieving the goals of the vision The Kingdom 2030, and that is why the vision focused on raising its contribution to the gross domestic product.
Dr. Al-Suhaibani referred to the report of the most important results related to the economic importance of the endowments sector in the Kingdom, which revealed important information about public endowments supervised by the General Authority for Endowments and other government agencies, where the value of public endowments is 54 billion riyals, and the authority supervises 14 billion of them, and real estate represents 80 percent of the endowments supervised by the authority, and its annual revenues amounted to 325 million riyals, and 13.1 percent of these returns were spent on the targeted banks, while the largest proportion of 86.9 percent was reinvested to develop endowment resources.
As for civil endowments managed by individuals or institutions, non-profit companies, and charities, their assets exceed 300 billion riyals and contribute to 49 percent of the financial resources of charitable institutions in the Kingdom.
Dr. Al-Suhaibani concluded that measuring the economic importance of the endowments sector requires special statistical treatment because it depends on inputs and outputs that are not exchanged in the market at their real cost, and the best methodology available to measure the economic importance of the endowments sector is to treat it as a sector within the sub-account of the non-profit sector, recommending the necessity of Updating the current surveys related to the non-profit sector and volunteer work to ensure the extraction of indicators specific to the endowment sector within the indicators of the sub-account of the non-profit sector in the Kingdom.
