This book assesses the role of government, institutions and individuals in each of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman and how the mineral wealth is distributed, looking at government- citizens relationships, recent developments and explaining the dramatic change in the political economy of these petro –states. Knowing that these countries rely purely on oil wealth, they tend to earn considerable revenues that sometimes are mismanaged due to bad political and economic structure, so looking at case studies, this study will test the relations between economic change, politics and oil and see why some countries achieve growth and are able to sustain it for future generations, whilst others don’t. Why some of these countries end up trapped by the “ oil curse” and to what extent they are affected by the curse (lack of productive investment). I will also focus on diversification and show how oil wealth affects diversification in each of the gulf countries by looking at 3 case studies and studying deeply IPE theories such as the oil curse and related theories such as the Dutch disease and the rentier state theory (RST).