The Middle East Oil Decade and Beyond

This study of fundamental aspects of the oil decade first examines the influence of the production, export and revenues of oil exerted on domestic, regional and international relations. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the expansion of higher education in the Arab world, no doubt the single most significant social change the oil decade engendered. Gilbar examines the significance of this, and also of the proportion of women students enrolling, and claims that the impetus for this expansion came from the realisation that development of human resources was the only means of transforming economic structures. Finally the author traces how, as of the early 1970s, the official Arab boycott on goods manufactured in Israel was increasingly being circumvented, and highlights the abrupt rise in the demands for industrial and consumer goods in the Arab oil states after 1973 as the reason for this. This development was to prove of crucial significance when, following the first Oslo agreement on13 September 1993, trade relations between many of the Arab states and Israel became overt.