From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 01:40:23 MDT
Jul 4th 2002
>>From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1213392
An unsparing new report by Arab scholars explains why their region lags
behind so much of the world....
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).
With Nader Fergany, an Egyptian sociologist, as the chief author, the report
carefully dissects and analyses the Arab world's strengths and failings. The
strengths, alas, consume little space; the failings are what interest the
writers. Inbuilt caution holds them back from naming too many names, but
they explain honestly and convincingly how and why they think their world
has gone wrong.
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