The Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries informs that the acronym of the Centre has been changed from SESRTCIC to SESRIC by the decision of its Board of Directors in its Twentyninth Meeting, held on September 10-11, 2007 in Ankara, Turkey and has been approved by the 11th Session Islamic Summit Conference held in Dakar, Senegal on March 13-14, 2008. The Centre would, therefore, appreciate that its new acronym be used whenever necessary in any future correspondence.

The agenda for the 11th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference held in Dakar, Senegal on March 13-14, 2008 focused on the following items:

• Implementation of the OIC Ten-Year Program of Action
• Adoption of the revised OIC Charter
• Two brainstorming sessions on economic cooperation among Member States, especially the African ones and Knowledge-sharing among Member States.

In accordance with the OIC Ten-Year Programme of Action target of facilitating the placement of OIC universities among the top 500 in the world, SESRIC is preparing the "Academic Ranking of Universities in the OIC Countries" by using the methodology designed by the Core Group and approved by the Foreign Ministers of the OIC Member Countries in May, 2007 in Islamabad, Pakistan.

In this connection, the Universities of the OIC Member Countries are requested to provide their inputs through filling in the questionnaire on University Ranking in OIC Member Countries.

The Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC), a subsidiary organ of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), is inviting project proposals that demonstrate/employ innovative approaches to poverty alleviation in the OIC Member Countries.

The Regional Workshop on DevInfo took place in Beirut from 7 to 10 July 2008. The workshop has been organized by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in partnership with the United Nations Development Group (UNDG), UN country offices, and the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC).

The Experts Group Meeting (EGM) on Enhancing Intra-OIC Trade was jointly organised by the Centre, the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation (ITFC) of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchange (TOBB) of the Republic of Turkey and the COMCEC Coordination Office and held at the campus of the Economy and Technology University (ETU) of the TOBB in Ankara on 5-6 July 2008.

The Sixth Session of the Islamic Conference of Tourism Ministers (ICTM) was held in Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic, on 29 June - 2 July 2008. It was preceded by a two-day Meeting of the Senior Officials on 29-30 June. Representatives from 32 member countries, the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), the Arab Tourism Organisation, Iran cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organisation, the General Secretariat of the OIC and its subsidiary, specialised and affiliated institutions attended the Conference. Dr. Savas Alpay, Director General, and Mr. Nabil Dabour, Acting Director of Research Department, represented the Centre thereat.

The Centre organised a training course on “Agriculture Statistics” at the Kazakhstan Statistical Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan on June 24-26, 2008. The course was provided by an expert from the Turkish Statistical Institute in Turkey and was attended by 20 staff members of the Kazakhstan Statistical Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

35th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) was held on 18-20 June 2008 in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

The Tourism Statistics Workshop was held on 16-18 June 2008 in Ankara, Turkey at Gazi Park Hotel. It was jointly organized by SESRIC, Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey, Turkish Statistical Institute and World Tourism Organization. 36 participants from ten OIC countries, namely Azerbaijan, Brunei, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey attended the workshop.

11th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis was held at Marina Congress Center, Helsinki, Finland, with the theme “Future of Global Economy”. The goal of the conference was to promote the exchange of ideas among economists conducting quantitative analysis of global economic issues.

One of the world’s best known series of conferences on development, the ABCDE conference took place at the International Convention Center in Cape Town (South Africa) on 9-11 June 2008. It was jointly organized by the World Bank and the National Treasury of South Africa.

The 24th Meeting of the Follow-up Committee of the COMCEC was held on 14-15 May 2008 in Antalya, Turkey with the participation of 10 member countries of the Committee. Iraq, Uganda, United Arab Emirates and Yemen also attended the Meeting as observers. Malaysia attended the Meeting as the Chairman of the 10th Islamic Summit. The OIC General Secretariat and the following subsidiary, affiliated and specialised organs (SESRIC, ICDT, IDB, ICCI, IUT, ITFC, OISA and ICYF-DC) attended the Meeting. The Centre was represented at the meeting by its Director General Dr. Savaş Alpay and Mr. Nabil Dabour, Senior Researcher/Acting Director of the Research Department.

The Islamic Development Bank (IDB) organised the First Meeting of the Statistical Working Group (SWG-1) at the OIC level on March 25- 26, 2008 at its Headquarters in Jeddah. The SWG has been initiated in accordance with the recommendation of the Expert Group Meeting on Statistical Capacity Building organised by IDB on April 29, 2007 which called on IDB to “establish a working group, in collaboration with the relevant OIC Institutions, to meet regularly in order to harmonise statistical activities, exchange experiences and best practices, develop common methodologies for collecting and processing data from Member Countries”. Similar proposal in the form of a project for establishing SWG was made by the Director General of SESRIC, Dr. Savas Alpay, during his visit to the IDB on December 3, 2007.

The volume of merchandise trade among countries has been rapidly increasing in recent two decades along with the tidal wave of globalization that began in the late 1980s. In this respect, the growing levels of economic integration through the emergence of economic blocks in addition to the increasing number of trade agreements around the world, the formation of more flexible global production systems thanks to the developments in information and telecommunication technologies accompanied by the proliferation of multinational firms and foreign direct investments, and the improvements in modes of transportation that have resulted in lower costs have been the major contributors to the expansion in the global merchandise trade.

Value added of a sector means the sector’s contribution to the total GDP and is calculated as production minus intermediate consumption in that sector. In this report, it is aimed to investigate the value added structure of three major sectors (agriculture, industry and services) at the sub-groups1 level of the OIC. But the individual country performances will also be highlighted when it is striking.

The importance of savings and investments for the development and growth of any economy is well documented in the economics literature. Savings are the main source of funds to finance capital investment, while the share of total GDP that is devoted to investment in fixed assets is an important indicator of future economic growth for an economy. However, the levels of savings and investments in developing countries, including some of the OIC member countries, are not satisfactory. Comparing the 1993-1995 and 2004-2006 averages of gross savings and investments in fixed assets as a % of GDP for the OIC member countries shows that much has to be done in this regard.

Distribution of population within OIC member countries is not uniform.

The most crowded countries of the world; Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh with more than 100 millions of people and the scarcely populated ones; Maldives, Brunei, Suriname, Comoros, Bahrain, Guyana, Djibouti and Qatar with less than 1 million are among the member countries.

The developing world including the OIC member countries suffers from relatively poor living conditions (environmental, economic, and social) and low quality health care. This situation is reflected in many vital demographic indicators, showing that the developing countries are undergoing unfavorable conditions relative to the developed countries.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), despite many caveats, is generally accepted as an indicator measuring the total size of the economy in a given year. Taking this into consideration, it is obvious that there are huge size differences among the economies of the OIC member countries. While six, out of the 57 OIC member countries (Maldives, Guyana, Djibouti, Gambia, Comoros, and Guinea Bissau) produced less than one billion in 2006, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia recorded real GDP figures of over $200 billion . In the same year, only 14 countries realised real GDP figures over the OIC group average of $34,866 million.

The Commission on Growth and Development was launched in April 2006 in order to gather and evolve over a period of two years a best understanding of the policies and strategies that underlie rapid and sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. It brings together as commissioners twenty-one leading practitioners in government, business and the policymaking fields from both the developing and industrialized world. The Commission's audience is the leaders of developing countries.

Africa is the world's poorest and least developed continent. Failing economies, high unemployment, human rights abuses, armed conflict and inadequate social services contribute to the outward migration of African professionals. Studies show that more than a third of Africa’s highly qualified human resources are presently in the diaspora (people of African origin living outside the continent) and most of them appear to be unlikely to return to their countries. 

A recent US$30 million grant from the World Bank aims to support the ongoing Microfinance Support for Poverty Reduction Project, being funded through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). It will help expand the outreach of financial services provided by the country’s microfinance service providers, especially women, in most of the provinces of Afghanistan. It will also help render the microfinance institutions, which have already started to diversify their funding sources beyond those provided by government and donors, more financially self-reliant.

According to the report of the World Bank Africa Development Indicators 2007 (ADI) based on more than a thousand indicators covering economic, human and private-sector development, governance, environment, and aid, many of the economies in Africa are seen to be growing fast and at steady rates. Over the past decade, Africa has recorded an average growth rate of 5.4 percent, which is at pace with the rest of the world and is supportive of the region’s ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health and other issues, and to help make it a significant investment destination for global capital.

The World Bank report Global Economic Prospects 2008 states that “resilience in developing economies is cushioning the current slowdown in the United States, with real GDP growth for developing countries expected to ease to 7.1 percent in 2008, while high-income countries are predicted to grow by a modest 2.2 percent”. It is noted that world growth slowed down slightly in 2007 to 3.6 percent from 3.9 percent in 2006, largely due to weaker growth in high-income countries. In 2008 global growth will go down further to 3.3 percent.

Mozambique, a country of 20 million, has been a strong economic performer in Africa, ever since the debilitating civil war ended in 1992, with the country realizing an average annual rate of economic growth of 8 percent between 1996 and 2006. This leads to a drop in poverty, where, between 1997 and 2003, close to 3 million people were delivered from abject poverty. This, in turn, brought a decline of 35 percent in infant and under-five mortality, and a 65 percent increase in net primary school enrollment, leading improvements in the Millennium Development Goals in these key areas.