OMAN: Fiscal silence ends with lower deficit and a likely issuance

GULF COUNTRIES - In Brief 25 Jul 2019 by Rory Fyfe
After months of disconcerting silence on fiscal data, Oman has announced a surprising improvement in its deficit, Fitch has affirmed its rating and the Sultanate has seized the opportunity to promptly appoint bankers for a new bond issuance. We doubt the fiscal outturn for the rest of 2019 will be quite as good. We may see other Gulf states follow suit with more issuance while the conducive environment for regional debt holds despite tensions. Fiscal silence For six months, Oman stopped updating the fiscal data in its statistical publications. Oman consistently published detailed fiscal data for many years, via monthly bulletins from the National Centre for Statistics & Information (NCSI) and, in a less detailed form, the central bank. The data is monthly, relatively detailed and had previously been published with only a month’s lag, all factors which are unusual in a region in which most countries only publish fiscal data annually and often with a sizable lag. However, during the first half of 2019, neither the NCSI nor the central bank published any new fiscal data, including the latest central bank bulletin on 14 July, which ended fiscal data at November 2018, while advancing other series to May. Why did Oman stop publishing fiscal data? We have no reason to think there has been a technical deficiency affecting the gathering of fiscal data in Oman. Communications problems between ministries, sometimes sparked by changes in personnel, have caused delays in data publishing in the past in various Gulf states, but we have no indications of any such issues in Oman between the Ministry of Finance, central bank and NCIS recently. It was, therefore, a deliberate decision to...

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