ABSTRACT
The countries lying on the littoral of the Gulf are caught in a difficult dilemma in their selection of strategies for national development, given the two basic factors affecting their domestic economies, that they are generally rich in hydrocarbon deposits but poor in almost every other natural resource. Oil exports from the area have earned increasingly large incomes but few governments have been able to transfer these revenues into productive assets of significant size to modify the essentially immature economic structures inherited from the pre-oil era. The underlying realities of limited natural resources remain much as they were in the early 1960s: natural resources are in general very small as compared with those of other regions, and the sparse natural wealth that does exist is only too often inefficiently or incompetently utilised. Estimates of the quantities and qualities of basic natural resources are inevitably, therefore, imprecise and open to different interpretations.
