Gulf to learn from Asia

Gulf to learn from Asia

ABU DHABI (AFP): Gulf Arab states should copy the development experience of Japan and other Asian economic giants if they want to achieve adequate growth in non-oil sectors, a former World Bank expert says.

The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) already has a developed infrastructure and other advantages absent in those Asian nations before they started to record the fastest growth rates in the world in the early 1960s, Luweis Hubeika wrote in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) daily al-Khaleej.

Hubeika, who served as a senior Middle East economy expert for several years in the World Bank, named Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia as the principal Asian economic giants.

He said the eight nations registered an annual growth rate of 5.5 percent between 1965 and 1990, compared with 2.3 percent in most industrialized countries, 0.2 percent in Africa and 1.8 percent in the Middle East and Latin America.