Monday 30 July 2018

Some facts on the countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

According to Mr Google:
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation founded in 1969 has 57 members, 56 of which are also member states of the United Nations with 47 countries being Muslim majority countries. Some, especially in West Africa, are – though with large Muslim populations – not necessarily Muslim majority countries.

GNP per capita.

The list I used for this is CIA World Factbook.
I added a couple of countries that were not in that WFB list, ending with a list of GNP per capita for 231 countries in the world.. The full list in Excel is here.
Here is a summary of the results ($US):

Non-oil OIC is relevant because those that have oil have incomes per capita that are real outliers.  Domestic populations are much smaller than their temporary "guest workers" from Asia -- South Asia, Philippines and the like.  They are reliant on oil extracted by western countries and on workers that are all but indentured labour.
Through this dodgy route, for example, Qatar is #2 in the list at nearly $US125,000 per capita/year.

  • The average of all OIC countries is 26% less than the world average.
  • For non-oil OIC the average is 65% below the world average.
  • The overall average rank is 160 out of 231.
  • There are 29 OIC countries in the bottom 100
  • Half of the bottom 20 countries are OIC countries.

Gender Equality

I used the Global Gender Report produced by the World Economic Forum (The Davos crowd).
It only covers 144 countries (not the 231 as above).  It is called "gender equity", in reality a measure of how well, or not, women are doing in these 144 countries.
Here's a summary of those results:

  • The average ranking of OIC countries is 117 out of 144.
  • Of the bottom 10 countries in the list, ALL are OIC countries.
  • OIC countries are overrepresented in the bottom half of the world gender equity rankings.


Four OIC countries did better than the global average

The raw figures are on the spreadsheet at the "OIC" tab.

Arab Human Development Report

The latest AHDR is on Youth unemployment. In Arab countries, all OIC members, youth unemployment is much higher than the world average 30% vs 13%, the highest in the world.


Arab Human Development Report
The report is actually a series: Youth (2016), Human Security (2009), Gender (2005), Freedom (2004), Knowledge (2003) and Opportunities (2002).
I'm not going to summarise them here, save to say that the meta-summary is this: in all the areas studied, Arab countries, all of them OIC countries, are falling well behind world averages and in most cases they are at the bottom.

What's caused this poor showing in all measures by OIC countries?

I'm going come back to this.  It will come as no surprise that I find Islam a factor on several levels.