The cost of Salat
Since each Salat takes 30 minutes to an hour, and there are four Salats during the normal eight- to 12-hour workday, we can conclude that most (if not all) of the entire Saudi economy shuts down for somewhere between one and four hours each day for Salat.
In other words, on top of lunch, smoke breaks, Facebooking, holidays, and other forms of time off, about 10 to 45 percent of the average worker’s day isn’t spent working. It’s spent in Salat.
If you wanted to make a quick, rough estimate of the cost of Salat, you could take Saudi’s GDP (about $1.7 trillion per year) and multiply that by the approximate average time of the normal workday that is spent in prayer (say, 30 percent) — which comes to about $510 billion per year.
But such an estimate would be on the high side. In reality, Salat’s primary impact is on the consumer-facing side of the service sector — restaurants, gas stations, etc. — which have to close down for the longest period of time and rely the most on human labor.
However, even if one were to build a more reasonable calculation that minimized the impact of Salat on the Saudi economy, the cost would still be immensely high. Even excluding all oil exports and looking solely at the service sector, the loss from Salat would still be more than $120 billion per year.
Which is a lot of money. The entire global video game industry is around $99 billion per year. The US cinema industry? About $11 billion.
However, Salat isn’t the only religious restriction costing the Saudi economy money. There’s also a host of gender restrictions that could cost the Saudi economy more than $80 billion per year.
www.vox.com
Since each Salat takes 30 minutes to an hour, and there are four Salats during the normal eight- to 12-hour workday, we can conclude that most (if not all) of the entire Saudi economy shuts down for somewhere between one and four hours each day for Salat.
In other words, on top of lunch, smoke breaks, Facebooking, holidays, and other forms of time off, about 10 to 45 percent of the average worker’s day isn’t spent working. It’s spent in Salat.
If you wanted to make a quick, rough estimate of the cost of Salat, you could take Saudi’s GDP (about $1.7 trillion per year) and multiply that by the approximate average time of the normal workday that is spent in prayer (say, 30 percent) — which comes to about $510 billion per year.
But such an estimate would be on the high side. In reality, Salat’s primary impact is on the consumer-facing side of the service sector — restaurants, gas stations, etc. — which have to close down for the longest period of time and rely the most on human labor.
However, even if one were to build a more reasonable calculation that minimized the impact of Salat on the Saudi economy, the cost would still be immensely high. Even excluding all oil exports and looking solely at the service sector, the loss from Salat would still be more than $120 billion per year.
Which is a lot of money. The entire global video game industry is around $99 billion per year. The US cinema industry? About $11 billion.
However, Salat isn’t the only religious restriction costing the Saudi economy money. There’s also a host of gender restrictions that could cost the Saudi economy more than $80 billion per year.
Saudi Arabia's strict religious rules cost its economy tens of billions every year
From mandatory prayer time to gender restrictions, the total cost to the economy could top $200 billion per year.
www.vox.com
