Narrow Results

The study examines the asymmetric influence of exports on economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using an augmented neoclassical production function incorporating export earnings and oil rent. It uses time-series yearly data from 1985 to 2019 published by the World Bank, employs the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach and Toda–Yamamoto (T–Y) Granger causality test. The outcomes reveal a long-run cointegration among economic growth, exports, oil rents and other variables. Both the exports and oil rents have unveiled asymmetric impacts on economic growth. The overall impact of exports on economic growth remains robust; its positive shock maintains neutrality, while negative shock yields affirmative influence on economic growth in the long run. Similarly, the positive components of oil rents remain neutral, while the negative shocks negatively affect economic growth, with an overall adverse impact. The T–Y causality unleashes that economic growth causes exports negative shocks, and negative shocks cause positive shocks of exports and a feedback relationship between economic growth and positive shock of exports, and thus, validates the NARDL outcomes and verifies their robustness. The outcomes imply that the Kingdom should expand its exports and enhance its nonoil output through product and market diversification measures.

Despite the proliferation of studies outlining the immense benefits obtained from e-learning, the understanding of students’ satisfaction with e-learning in developing countries is still unclear. Therefore, this paper investigates the relationship between Saudi students’ satisfaction with online courses and a number of individual, as well as institutional characteristics cited as robust predictors of students’ satisfaction in the educational literature. These include: students’ levels of internet self-efficacy, self-regulated learning, assessment of course and instructors’ interactivity and their evaluation of the Learning Management System (LMS) used. The results indicated that students’ internet self-efficacy and self-regulated learning constitute critical factors influencing students’ satisfaction with e-learning. Further, students’ assessment of course, as well as instructors’ interactivity are found to marginally affect perceived satisfaction with e-learning among Saudi students. The LMS used (Blackboard) seemed to be the weakest factor influencing students’ experience with online education. Overall, based on the results obtained and in order to maximise the benefits of e-learning; this paper recommends for Saudi universities to extensively use LMS to increase the interactions among primary stakeholders: students–instructors, students–students and students–LMS.

This chapter portrays a glance picture of entrepreneurship in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It begins with an overview of the Saudi context and its development approach. Then, it describes the state of entrepreneurship and maps the Saudi entrepreneurial ecosystem highlighting the challenges and current issues. The chapter concludes by suggesting further development of entrepreneurship research in Saudi Arabia.