Gulf Arab countries will abolish a 5 percent import duty within one to two months to ease a supply strain that has been mostly felt in Saudi Arabia, an official from a regional Gulf bloc said on Saturday. Finance ministers from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will examine the proposed measure at a meeting later on Saturday.
"There is consensus among GCC countries about this proposal. It will be approved without any problem but it will probably take a month or two for it to be implemented," an official from the GCC secretariat told Reuters before the start of the meeting. Saudi Arabia and five other Gulf Arab countries including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have formed a GCC customs union which imposes a common external tariff for products imported from outside their bloc.
After a relative lull, steel demand began soaring in the second half of 2009 in Saudi Arabia, fuelled mainly by massive state spending by the world's top oil exporter on infrastructure to diversify the economy and counter the effects of the global economic downturn.
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