Abstract
Kuwait has the most developed banking system in the Arab Gulf, with virtually all family heads having bank accounts, and most businesses looking to banks for at least some of their financing needs. The ratio of aggregate bank deposits to gross domestic product is over twice the Saudi Arabian level, an important indicator of the extent to which the banking habit has caught on within the country. The National Bank of Kuwait, the leading domestic bank, is the third largest in the Gulf in terms of both assets and deposits, and other Kuwait banks such as the Gulf Bank, the Commercial Bank of Kuwait and the Al-Ahli and Burgan Banks are major forces in regional banking. Four of the top ten Arab Gulf banks are Kuwaiti, which demonstrates the significance of Kuwait based banks.
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Notes and References
Much of this information and that which follows comes from the files in the India Office archives in London under the Kuwait Section R/5/1/547.
Rodney Wilson, ‘Origins of Banking in the Gulf: The Eastern Bank Experience, 1917–1950’, Business History, vol. 29, no. 2, 1987 pp. 178–98.
Geoffrey Jones Banking and Empire in Iran: The History of the British Bank of the Middle East, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Geoffrey Jones Banking and Oil: The History of the British Bank of the Middle East vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1987) chaps 1 and 2.
See Rodney Wilson, Banking and Finance in the Arab Middle East (Macmillan, 1983) pp. 101–10.
Rodney Wilson, Islamic Financial Markets (Routledge, 1989) ch. 8.
Rodney Wilson, Gulf Trade and Finance: Trends and Market Prospects (Graham and Trotman, 1987) pp. 37–8.
Ibid., p. 41.
Mohammed Rabooy, ‘Islamic Banking in Theory and Practice’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1989; contains a chapter on the Kuwait Finance House.
Industrial Bank of Kuwait, Annual Report, 1987, pp. 20–1.
M.W. Khouja and P. G. Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait: Development and Role in International Finance (Macmillan, 1979) pp. 163–4.
Salem Abdul Aziz Al Sabah, ‘Sustained Economic Growth and the Wider Role of Monetary Policy’, Special Report on Kuwait by the Institutional Investor, 1987, pp. 4–7.
Tony Walker, ‘Stability Restored at Considerable Cost’, The Financial Times Survey on Kuwait, 22 February 1988.
Ayman Abdul-Hadi, Stock Markets of the Arab World: Trends, Problems and Prospects for Integration (Routledge, 1988) pp. 19–46.
Fida Darwiche, The Gulf Stock Exchange Crash: The Rise and Fall of the Souq al-Manakh (Croom Helm, 1986) chaps 3 and 4 especially.
Jean-François Seznec, The Financial Markets of the Arabian Gulf (Croom Helm, 1987) p. 135.
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© 1991 John R. Presley and Rodney Wilson
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Presley, J.R., Wilson, R. (1991). Kuwait. In: Banking in the Arab Gulf. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10791-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10791-9_3
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