Dating the Turn in Saudi Arabia’s Carbon Productivity: Structural-Break Evidence and the Vision 2030 Baseline

This study examines when Saudi Arabia’s carbon productivity changed direction and which macroeconomic channels account for that change. Carbon productivity is measured as real gross domestic product per tonne of carbon dioxide over 1990–2024. Rather than imposing a reform date, the analysis estimates the slope change through a maximum-F search with bootstrap critical values and two complementary uncertainty summaries. The change is then decomposed into energy-productivity and carbon-intensity-of-energy components and compared across the Gulf economies. The estimated inflection lies in the early 2010s: the point estimate is 2012, the central 2.5–97.5% bootstrap percentile date interval is 2010–2014, and a complementary profile-F diagnostic set is 2009–2014. A finite-sample calibration shows that these ranges undercover under persistence near that observed in the data, so they are interpreted as descriptive uncertainty summaries rather than exact 95% confidence procedures. The estimated origin of the change therefore predates Vision 2030, although later acceleration is not ruled out. Over the available decomposition window, energy productivity and fuel mix account for the post-break improvement in roughly a two-to-one proportion. The published renewable indicator is measured against total final energy rather than primary energy and is too coarsely rounded for quantitative attribution of the fuel-mix change. A supporting composite-index diagnostic is highly trended and, in this short sample, does not yield a stable association with carbon productivity. Carbon productivity in 2024 remained 14.3% below its 1990 level while emissions were 275% higher, indicating relative rather than absolute decoupling. The results carry wider implications for measuring green growth in resource-based economies.