Written by a group of Arab scholars, the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report is an unrelenting indictment of social, economic, and political backwardness in the Arab world, and was widely acclaimed in the West. But by lumping a large number of Arab countries together, the report of gives an undiscriminating and outdated picture of Arab progress. In a 2009 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, University of California Economist James Rauch, and co-author Scott Kostyshak, at Princeton, challenge this unfavorable view of Arab development by looking at the Arab countries in new and more careful way. In this documentary, James Rauch takes us through his findings in detail and shows that in most areas of development the Arab countries are rapidly catching up to the rest of the world.

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