DAR AL ISLAM- QATAR: DOES ISLAM MAKE MOSLEMS DIRT POOR?!?

Economic liberty and Islam
By Richard W. Rahn

Is there something inherent in Islam that has resulted in most Muslims living in poor countries, with the exception of the relatively few who live in the oil rich states? This was just one of the questions a group of American and Islamic scholars and experts were trying to answer in Doha, Qatar, last week.

Qatar has the world's second largest gas reserves (after Russia) along with considerable oil, yet it only has about 200,000 citizens (and 600,000 foreign workers). The city of Doha, where roughly half of the population lives, gives the appearance of being the world's largest and most modern and luxurious conference center.

The reality for most Muslims is radically different. There about 1.3 billion Muslims (21 percent of the world's population), contrasted with 2.1 billion Christians (about 33 percent of the world's population). (The "nonreligious," Hindus, Buddhists and/or traditional Chinese account for another 42 percent; while the remaining 4 percent of the world's population are scattered among thousands of other religions). While Christians are disproportionately rich, Muslims are disproportionately poor.

The U.N. publishes the Human Development Index (HDI) each year. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living. The Index was originally developed in 1990 by a Pakistani economist. Of the 32 countries rated "High" last year, not one was a Muslim majority country. However, of the 30 countries rated "Low," 16 were Muslim countries.

There are two major indices of economic freedom: one produced by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal and the other under the auspices of the Fraser and Cato Institutes. Each uses a slightly different methodology but both show Islamic countries on average have much lower economic freedom than non-Islamic countries.

The World Bank provides a ranking each year of countries by per capita income, and also an index of "Ease of Doing Business" (EDB) by country. Again, both these indices show that the Islamic countries are greatly underrepresented in the top quintile and overrepresented in the bottom, despite having several very oil rich low-population countries. Roughly one-quarter of the world's countries have a Muslim majority, so it would be expected they should represent about 25 percent of each of the quintiles in the accompanying table were development and economic freedom equally or even randomly distributed among the world's nations.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Economic liberty and Islam