Can Kuwait close the production gap with Gulf rivals?

It’s a paradox of Opec strategy that sometimes low oil prices bring higher production. Fiscal pressures spur countries to reform and attract outside investment to make up for what they lose in volume, as Venezuela and Iran did in the late 1990s and Iraq did in 2009. 

Kuwait may be about to take that road, to make up ground on its Gulf colleagues.

The emirate’s budgetary position is not desperate. S&P rates the country at a respectable AA- and assigns net government assets of more than 500 percent of GDP.

But its finance…