The Saudi Government’s 2030 Vision directs local banks to increase and improve credit for the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) of the economy (Jadwa, 2017). Banks are, however, still finding it difficult to provide credit for small businesses that meet Basel’s capital requirements. Most of the current credit-risk models only apply to large corporations with little constructed for SMEs applications (Altman and Sabato, 2007). This study fills this gap by focusing on the Saudi SMEs perspective. My empirical work constructs a bankruptcy prediction model based on logistic regressions that cover 14,727 firm-year observations for an 11-year period between 2001 and 2011. I use the first eight years data (2001-2008) to build the model and use it to predict the last three years (2009-2011) of the sample, i.e. conducting an out-of-sample test. This approach yields a highly accurate model with great prediction power, though the results are partially influenced by the external economic and geopolitical volatilities that took place during the period of 2009-2010 (the world financial crisis). To avoid making predictions in such a volatile period, I rebuild the model based on 2003-2010 data, and use it to predict the default events for 2011. The new model is highly consistent and accurate. My model suggests that, from an academic perspective, some key quantitative variables, such as gross profit margin, days inventory, revenues, days payable and age of the entity, have a significant power in predicting the default probability of an entity. I further price the risks of the SMEs by using a credit-risk pricing model similar to Bauer and Agarwal (2014), which enables us to determine the risk-return tradeoffs on Saudi’s SMEs.

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Previous research on framing has proved its strong effects on the social perception and political preferences of individuals. Therefore, the aim of this research is to explore how Saudi women's issues have been framed in a sample of United States and Saudi newspapers. Saudi Vision 2030 is the post-oil plan for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that was announced on April 25, 2016. The sample of this thesis was 300 news stories from eight newspapers. The U.S. newspapers were the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. The Saudi newspapers were Al Riyadh, Okaz, Al Jazirah, and Al Watan. This thesis explores how these issues have been covered before and after Saudi Vision 2030 by answering five basic questions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the news stories. For the quantitative analysis, five pre-defined generic frames from Semetko and Valkenburg were adopted: conflict frame, human interest frame, morality frame, economic consequences frame, and responsibility frame. An inductive approach to find the new frames was used for the qualitative analysis. Moreover, this thesis looked at how U.S. and Saudi newspapers have visually framed Saudi women through an analysis of the types of images used in the news stories related to Saudi women's issues. The main finding suggests that within the used frames in the newspapers, the U.S. newspapers focused more on the human-interest frame, while the Saudi newspapers mostly used the economic frame. Furthermore, the types of issues covered are discussed.

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There has been a mixed public response on social media toward Saudi Vision 2030, which could threaten public support of its implementation. This research investigated local tensions between social, religious, political, and economic values concerning the Saudi Vision 2030 plan, with a view to understanding the opportunities and challenges of social and cultural change within an evolving Saudi society. In this study, Twitter activity is treated as a societal mirror that reflects some of the perceptions regarding the transformations taking place within Saudi society. Both a case study informed by tweets sampled from Saudi Arabia and Vision 2030 related documentation explored how the current public social media discourse reflects existing social, religious, and cultural tensions concerning the government-proposed Vision 2030. This study drew on theoretical framework informed by Durkheim’s and Ibn Khaldun’s theory of social change, Merton’s strain theory, and Luhmann’s Social System Theory, to explore social, political, economic, and religious tensions found within the interactions of Twitter users around projects and events implemented or inspired by Vision 2030. An application programming interface (API) was used to retrieve Twitter posts, while a thematic analysis was applied to published documents related to Vision 2030 to identify Saudi society’s challenges to the implementation of the Vision. The study found that within Saudi society, Vision 2030 had an impact upon the normative disorder already taking place due to the rapid changes brought about by the Vision. Specifically, the study highlighted the link between ambiguous, clear, or absent norms, and a person’s pre-existing background knowledge. Social and religious group norms were more ambitious than clear, whereas economic group norms tended to be clearer. Finally, the study found that over time, through public debates, norms moved from an ambiguous and absent stage and became increasingly well-defined. The study showed that Saudi society, as a result of Vision 2030, is experiencing a normative disorder.

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