Saudi Arabia's Digital Innovation Trajectories: Interlinkages Between Oil Exports, Fiscal Shocks, Financial Stress, and Legislation

ABSTRACT Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 aims to build a digital innovation hub by leveraging its oil export potential, public finances, and legislative strength. We examine how Saudi Arabia's digital innovation, proxied by ICT patent publications, responds to oil export specialization. The analysis controls for fiscal instrument shocks, financial stress, and legislative strength, using monthly data from January 2000 to December 2024. Given the non‐normal and non‐stationary characteristics of the data, we employ sophisticated partial cross‐quantilogram and time‐varying quantile causality techniques. Our findings establish that export specialization exerts a strong positive influence on digital innovation (ICT patent publications) from bear to bull markets. Fiscal instrument shocks have a more negative impact than financial stress, though some positive effects are also observed across market conditions. Notably, oil export specialization plays a moderating role by reducing fiscal and financial stresses, thereby promoting digital innovation. Legislative strength shows a mixed effect but becomes beneficial when moderating fiscal and financial pressures to stimulate digital innovation. We recommend improving fiscal and financial health to harness the potential of oil export specialization for proliferating digital innovation within a robust legislative framework.