"Expenses must be reduced to cope with the fallout from coronavirus and we need to be careful not to increase the cost of debt", the minister said in an interview with Al Arabiya TV on Saturday. "The real impact of the coronavirus pandemic will appear in the second quarter, and we have to face a very big revenue shock", he said.
According to Al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia is considering a wide range of "strict and painful measures" to cut spending.
"We must tighten the belt and come out of the crisis strong", the finance minister said, stressing that "the journey ahead is long".
Al-Jadaan said that Saudi Arabia, as well as the world as a whole, will not return to what it was like before the coronavirus pandemic and suggested that economic processes will undergo significant changes.
In April, Saudi Arabian Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan said that his country was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting significant drop in oil revenues from a position of strength, since serious reforms had been carried out in the country in recent years, while also indicating that Saudi Arabia had enough of a buffer to deal with the low prices.
As of 2 May, 3,272,202 people have contracted the novel coronavirus, with over 230,000 fatalities registered, the World Health Organization count shows. According to data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre, more than 3.4 million COVID-19 cases have been confirmed globally since the start of the pandemic in December of last year. The global death toll from the viral disease stands at over 242,000.
