Arab Resources: The Transformation of a Society

Edited by Ibrahim Ibrahim. Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1983. 304 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by William Lee

At two recent U.S.-Middle East business conferences, Saudi speakers were heard to say that they welcomed the coming period of reduced revenues and tighter budgets in the Arab oil-producing states as a "breathing space," a "time for consolidation." The clear implication was that the societies of the Arabian peninsula, particularly, could use this time to try and sort out some of the social and economic consequences of the past decade of dizzying growth and change. What this will involve, clearly, is a husbanding of their national resources—natural, financial and above all human—for the next phase of economic development.

This book—a compilation of papers from the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies sixth annual symposium, and edited by CCAS research professor Ibrahim Ibrahim—examines those resources by sector and considers many aspects of their consequences for Arab economic development.

Waiting for Complementarity

A prevailing theme, well-developed in four overview" chapters at the outset, is the largely unrealized "complementarity" of Arab human, energy, financial and agricultural resources. For example, in discussing the flow of money out of the Arab region, International Monetary Fund economist George Abed argues that the deployment of Arab financial resources to date has brought "only modest and fragmentary rewards." If the Arab oil-surplus countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq and Libya) could develop a coherent strategy for using their financial resources, he says, they "could wield enormous power in the international economic arena." Since Dr. Abed wrote his essay, the biggest Arab oil-exporters have started drawing down their foreign reserves in order to cover their current budgetary requirements, and it is difficult to think of many instances to date where they have used their financial "clout" to their own political advantage. Even regarding the recycling of surpluses within the international financial system, Dr. Abed concludes that "although individual Arab countries appear to have made some gains in this regard, it is not clear that the Arab world as a whole has derived substantial economic or strategic benefits commensurate with the resources deployed."

Just as Arab financial power has failed to produce commensurate Arab political power in world monetary circles, so the plethora of Arab development funds and pan-Arab economic groupings has singularly failed to produce the long-sought goal of Arab unity—or even much in the way of a practical approach to the "complementarity" of Arab resources mentioned frequently in this book. It is to be hoped that the new Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—virtually unheralded in this volume, yet surely an outstanding effort at rationalizing Arab resources—will set a precedent.

Writing from his vast experience in past efforts at regional integration, Dr. Yusif A. Sayigh, perhaps the most prominent contemporary Arab economist, argues that provincialism has overwhelmed more general, regional concerns time after time. The Council for Arab Economic Unity, for example, still has only 13 signatory members; the "Arab Common Market" has only four subscribers to its trade and tariff regimes. The most active and successful institutions, Dr. Sayigh says, such as the Arab funds and OAPEC (the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries), "owe most of their creditable performance to the fact that they are autonomous bodies and have enjoyed capable and imaginative leadership."

The Pressures of Reality

Dr. Sayigh strikes what he admits is a somewhat gloomy tone when—in what might serve as a summing-up of this book—he argues that "the pressure of reality will eventually move the Arab world toward complementarity." He writes: "The compelling aspects of this reality include: the disparate and superficial development that is presently taking place; the growing dependence on the advanced industrial world along with the growing financial wealth of an important part of the Arab region, and the exorbitant price that the region is paying for its dependence in terms of technology, arms and food; the approach of oil depletion at the same time as Arab financial reserves abroad become increasingly a hostage in the hands of their keepers; and, above all, the increasing threat that Israel and the imperialism that bolsters it constitute to the well-being and very existence of the region's true independence."

The 17 essays in this book—a few of which, it must be said, are too technical, excessively scholarly in tone or somewhat removed from the subject under discussion—provide much food for thought. The more political of the pieces anticipated a rise in tensions coinciding with new social and economic pressures. Georgetown's Dr. Hisham Sharabi has the last word: "The revolution of rising expectations has now become the revolution of mounting frustrations..."

William Lee is the Washington-based U.S. Bureau Chief of the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED).