Thanks to the hard work of my colleagues Fadi Haddadin and Ghaleb Hijazi, who run Cato's Arabic website Misbahalhurriyya.org, an elegant Arabic edition of the 2006 Economic Freedom of the World Report has now been released. The Arabic version was unveiled at a recent meeting in Beirut organized by the Fraser Institute of Canada and the Friedrich-Naumann Stiftung of Germany that we attended with our colleague Andrei Illarionov.

The printing of the Arabic edition was gorgeous, as were the cool brochures and other materials that Fadi and Ghaleb had produced in Jordan. The entire report in Arabic is available online now for downloading in PDF format. The availability of such thorough-going comparisons should, I hope, introduce a greater degree of cause-and-effect thinking into discussions of policy, which would be a great advance over the conspiracy theorizing that is unfortunately so common in the Middle East. (Besides all the data, it includes William Easterly's hard-hitting critique of "foreign aid," "Freedom vs. Collectivism in Foreign Aid.")

The printed edition of the report was also delivered to the economics and politics editors at An Nahar, Al Hayat, and other papers (many more are in the mail) and will be distributed at the upcoming meeting of Arab economists in Kuwait this weekend. Congratulations to Fadi and Ghaleb and their team for such a success.

Our colleague Andrei Illarionov gave a remarkable presentation, based on statistical data, on the roots of economic stagnation in the Arab Middle East. A condensed version will appear in the Arabic press, and — if I can cajole him — in English, Spanish, Russian, and other languages.