Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 44-45

United Nations Report

Arab Human Development Report Takes an Honest Look at Region

By Ian Williams

At the beginning of July, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issued the first Arab Human Development Report examining the social progress of the Arab world. Overall, it does not look good. Because this was a regional report, its authors were able to be much more candid than if dealing with individual countries with sensitive governments.

The independent experts who worked on the report for over a year have not pulled their punches in describing what is wrong with the region. They target in particular three deficits: exclusion of women from social, economic and political life; the exclusion of most citizens of whatever gender from politics and governance; and the exclusion of most of the region from the modern, knowledge-based economy.

Overall, the report emphasizes, the Arab states have lower freedom indexes and lower voice and accountability figures than sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of Arab women cannot read or write, and the maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and the Caribbean and four times that of East Asia. Compared with industrialized countries, Arab spending per person on education dropped from one-fifth of that in industrialized countries in 1980 to one-tenth in the mid-1990s. Arab spending on research and development represents less than 0.5 percent of GNP, compared to 1.26 percent for Cuba and 2.9 percent for Japan in 1995. Internet connectivity is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report points out that more than a million highly qualified Arabs already are working in and contributing to the prosperity of the industrialized countries. While exporting skills, however, the region is not importing sufficient knowledge from elsewhere. The entire Arab world translates only about 300 books a year, for example—one-fifth of the number that Greece translates, while Spain translates more books annually than the whole Arab world has done in over a thousand years!

The small size of the Arab states demands regional economic cooperation to survive, let alone thrive, the report concludes. While the Arab region has some of the world’s oldest regional institutions and a host of treaties and committees on integration of defense, culture, economy, freedom of movement for capital goods and people, the report suggests that, all too often, these are rhetorical rather than real.

In fact, the Arab region has fewer excuses for its poor performance, since compared with others it is “richer than it is developed,” the AHDR concludes. The report also takes pains, however, to correct the distorted global perception of untold Arab wealth. Despite the oil, the GDP of all Arab states combined is less than that of Spain alone. There are huge disparities among Arab countries, moreover, with Kuwait near the top of the Human Development Index and Djibouti near the bottom. Indeed the report shows that, over the past decade, the oil-based economies have grown more slowly than their more diversified counterparts.

Not Just GDP

There is a background to all this. In 1990, UNDP had its finest hour with the publication of the first Human Development Report, which has been published annually since. Throughout the Reagan years, the World Bank and the IMF, along with many Western governments, had tried to force a “Chile”-style economic model on the world: Low taxes, low tariffs, and low government spending, the argument went, would give economies a boom and everyone would benefit from the increase in wealth.

The IMF and World Bank introduced “Structural Adjustment Programs,” which made loans—and hence countries’ credit ratings—conditional on compliance with the Reagan-style economics. Under pressure, developing world countries cut spending on schools, health, and food programs—and often faced riots and strikes as a result.

“The Human Development Program” turned the tide. UNDP maintained that there was more to development than GDP. Did a country’s people live longer? Were they healthier? Better educated? It compiled the “Human Development Index,” which factored in life expectancy, literacy levels, and income to produce a different picture of the world—one in which Scandinavian countries, Canada and Japan, which spent more on health and education, outranked the U.S.

Developing country governments and many institutions in the developing world welcomed the UNDP’s challenge to the IMF and World Bank. Soon, the Structural Adjustment Programs were adapted to cushion the blows on the poor, and, within five years after James Wolfensohn took over as head of the Bank, he adopted the same ideas as the Human Development Report.

Some governments later began to object when subsequent reports began to include issues such as women’s role in society, civil rights and democracy as part of the development package of successful countries. Some Arab governments, in fact, were very unhappy with these aspects.

UNDP country offices already have worked with local institutions and governments to produce scores of national HDRs, which, says Regional Bureau of Arab States director Rima Khalef Hunaidi, “have had a significant impact on the development debate in the region.” Since they are produced with local institutions, however, critics allege that they have pulled their punches.

It is a measure of the AHDR’s integrity that its editor, Nader Fergany, suggests a future “Alternative Human Development Index” which actually puts most of the Arab countries even lower down the scale than they already are in the existing Global HDR. He factors in gender empowerment, a freedom score, Internet hosts per capita, and carbon dioxide emissions per capita to highlight the areas on which the region needs to concentrate.

Accentuating the Positive

The report tends to generalize the negative while identifying and accentuating the positive, singling out states like Kuwait and Qatar that have moved toward democracy, or those like Jordan and Egypt that have improved women’s legal status.

For a knowledge-based economy, the report cites Dubai Internet City, which has wired schools, homes and businesses, and already has succeeded in attracting leading international companies. So, while properly critical of Arab failures, the report ends on an optimistic note. Quoting Mark Malloch Brown, “The Arab region has dramatically reduced poverty and inequality in the 20th Century. It can do so again in the 21st.”

In the meantime, however, perhaps the most telling comment on the issues the report measures came from the young Arabs polled in the course of its preparation. More than half of them saw their future in emigration.

While many traditionally pro-Israeli media jumped on the report to suggest that the Arab world was inherently backward, the report boldly took on the issue of the Israeli conflict, declaring that Israeli occupation was not only clearly a bad thing for the development of the occupied Palestinian territories, but that it had given many regimes in the region an excuse to ignore the necessary developments of civil society and democracy.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.