IP: Arab development

[David Farber <dfarber () earthlink net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli" <mo () idiopathic com>
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 15:16:55 
To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Arab development

Dear Dave,
I thought IP'ers might be interested in this article about a recent
UN's report. It details reasons for the Arab world's consistently bad
record on progress and development. (The article also contains a link
to the UN's original report).

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Arab development

Self-doomed to failure
Jul 4th 2002
> From The Economist print edition

"An unsparing new report by Arab scholars explains why their region
lags behind so much of the world

"WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the
times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil,
and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic
heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic
conflict. It shook off its colonial or neo-colonial legacies long ago,
and the countries that had revolutions should have had time to recover
from them. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers,
whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they
die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as
lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young,
burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious
tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they
can.

"Across dinner tables from Morocco to the Gulf, but above all in
Egypt, the Arab world's natural leader, Arab intellectuals endlessly
ask one another how and why things came to turn out in this
unnecessarily bad way. A team of such scholars (it is indicative of
the barriers to freely expressed thought that there are almost no
worthwhile think-tanks in the Arab world) have now spent a year
putting their experience to diagnostic use in the "Arab Human
Development Report 2002", published this week by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP)." [snip]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1213392

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mo

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
e mo () idiopathic com
w www.idiopathic.com/mo
w www.handheldsfordoctors.com
w www.medicalapproaches.com

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