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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Politics or economics?, September 29, 2005
The difference between a journalist and a scholar is that a journalist will write a book to mirror the views of his intended audience. This book is journalism, not scholarship. It is very well-written and will tell you what you want to hear. The author has advances an hypothesis as well as an agenda. I found Robert J. Lieber's book The American Era much more dispassionate and realistic.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Does better when discussing the impact of politics on the economy, August 13, 2005
The poor performance of Arab economies has been well documented, including in the much-cited Arab Human Development Report written by Arab intellectuals for the U.N. Development Program.[1] But the numbers, no matter how well presented, do not necessarily bring to life how Arab economies actually work as seen by the ordinary businessman or government official. Drawing heavily on his experience from 1998 to 2001 as The Wall Street Journal's Middle East correspondent, Glain provides a series of anecdotes about the lack of government transparency and accountability as well as the other main barriers to economic efficiency. He provides neither a structured or comprehensive account of how the economies work, much less what is needed to improve them. Glain's account is not the place to look for analysis about high politics and diplomacy. He touches on these subjects at times, but what he has to say is of uneven quality-this is obviously not his strong point. In particular, his comments about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are not insightful.
He does better when discussing the impact of politics on the economy where he skillfully musters tales from individual businessmen to bring to life how "ham-fisted, risk averse bureaucracy" stifles the rich talent of Arab entrepreneurs and workers. He gives a feel for life's frustrations with stories focused on the main problem of excessive state interference, in all its corruption, neglect, and bad management.
Glain considers six areas in successive chapters: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq. The best chapters by far are those on Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. These bring out how political interference has made two economies with such enormous potential into failures. He is particularly skillful at exposing the wide gaps between rhetoric about economic reform and the unpleasant realities of the continued dead hand of political interference to protect the well-placed. The Syria chapter is impeded by the difficulty of gathering information, and the Iraq chapter suffers from the problem of gauging how the economy is functioning under the peculiar circumstances of an occupation after decades of tyrannical rule.
Glain writes with obvious empathy for the suffering Arab peoples, and his confidence in their potential-if freed of such depressing governments-shines through. His account is a good example of the principle that the true friends of the Arabs are those who tell the brutal truth about the poor state to which they have been reduced by their leaders.
Patrick Clawson
[1] See "How the Arabs Compare: Arab Human Development Report 2002," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2002, pp. 59-67.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Bother, October 5, 2008
This review is from: Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World (Paperback)
If you are looking for a book providing anaylsis on the economics of the Arab world, this is not it. The Arab world streches from Morraco to Iraq, yet the author only covers the handful of nations of the Levant. How does one understand the economics of the Arab world without exploring the oil industry of the Gulf nations, which dominates the economy and politics of the entire Middle East. The author's agenda is to blame the West in general and the US in particular for every problem in the region. Throughout the book he constantly pushes politically correct propaganda about Islam's peaceful history and tolerance and protection of other religious groups. The author paints a picture of an enlightend Islamo-Arab utopia that knew no malice until provoked by European Crusaders and colonization. And somehow the US is responsible now for what Europeans did then. In reality Islamic history is full of conquest, enslavement, violent coups, despotism, and pogroms. In this age of a global ecomomy, it is true that the politics and economics of the US (the richest nation) greatly influence the rest of the world. However, the author fails to consider the major factors contributing to Arab economic stagnation, such as cultural aversion to many types of work, low worker productivity compared to the rest of the world, geography that lacks diverse natural resources, cultural acceptance of corruption, graft, and nepotism at every level of government and business, religiously imposed finacial restrictions that are incompatible with modern banking systems, tribalism and sectarianism, the malaise that fell over the Arab world under the administration of the Ottomans (an Islamic empire). The author provides no depth of analysis. In fact, other than conveying the personal experiences and opinions of a few minor businessmen, this book isn't about economics at all. If you are looking for insight into economics of the Arab world don't waste your time with this book.
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