Saudi Arabia’s roadshow to London, New York, Boston and Los Angeles to raise billions of dollars from international fund managers captured global headlines, but the path ahead to shore up its finances is littered with potholes. The Kingdom is tapping capital markets to plug a record budget deficit topping 15 per cent of GDP last year.

Government salaries were recently slashed by 20 per cent, privatisation plans are in the works and contractors are being squeezed by a combination of unpaid bills and projects being stopped in their tracks. It is a similar challenge throughout the Gulf oil exporting states according to the latest regional economic snapshot from the International Monetary Fund.

Tucked inside its report was an alarming number, that non-oil growth is forecast to come in at 1.75 per cent this year after averaging 7 per cent between 2000-14. In other words, without the elixir of high oil prices, non-energy activities have nearly ground to a halt and that the IMF suggests could be with us for years to come.

“It is a big shock,” Masood Ahmad, the regional director of IMF told me in an interview on a visit to Dubai. “The level of non-oil growth will be substantially below the level we saw when oil prices were high and then rising from there to numbers that were in the $100 plus range.”

Due to the benefit of proven oil reserves and ample sovereign savings, investors remained all too willing to snap up government bonds whether from Qatar, the UAE, Oman or Saudi Arabia, but that does not negate the fact everyone is watching to see if the young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can deliver on his much heralded “2030 Vision”.

“Going forward it will be important to accompany the attempts to get financing from the market with a credible, coherent and medium term fiscal plan,” said Ahmad. In IMF language, it is about “implementing, prioritising and sequencing” so that in a few years the people of Saudi Arabia can begin to see the results of the attempted economic transformation.

The goal is the restore a fiscal balance by 2020, bring down youth unemployment and cut the addiction to oil. Certainly no one can argue with the intention, but it is a painful transition.

According to Standard Chartered bank, Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit will remain stubbornly high this year at over 13 per cent; tumble to 4.3 per cent next year and about 1 per cent by 2018. The bank says the non-oil economy is now in recession and that the conflict in Yemen may be costing the kingdom over $250 million dollars a month.

With that economic and security backdrop, Riyadh decided to alter course on its oil policy and support the first cut by Opec in eight years. During my one-on-one interview at the World Energy Council meeting in Istanbul, energy minister Khalid Al Falih was unapologetic about the change in strategy.

“I think the market forces have shifted between 2014 and now,” Al-Falih said. “I think it’s time to do something different than what we were faced with in 2014.”

Al Falih said it was “not unthinkable” for crude to hit $60 a barrel by year’s end if Opec and non-Opec players can finalise the details of their agreement by the next meeting in Vienna on November 30. Despite efforts to wean the Kingdom off its dependency of crude, a price recovery is essential to another key component of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 plan, an initial public offering of Saudi Aramco in two years.

“We are optimistic,” said Amin Nasser, chief executive of the state oil giant. “The market has started to recover, we expect it to recover even more in 2017 and I think the time in 2018 will be almost right.”

Riyadh is targeting a $2 trillion valuation and taking the proceeds of an expected 5 per cent IPO to fund what they hope will be the largest sovereign fund in the world. Like the budget consolidation now underway, it means ushering in a new way of thinking and greater transparency for Aramco.

After decades of keeping its finances under wraps, investors will have the chance to look under the hood of the behemoth known in the industry for its low cost production and world-class reservoir management with the highest proven reserves of any oil company at over 260 billion barrels.

Transformation is underway … but as the IMF rightly said it is a big shock.

The writer is CNNMoney’s Emerging Markets Editor.