Kuwait has been ranked high on the list of Arab states in the development of human resources, says a study by World Bank conducted between 2004 and 2008.

Kuwait trails behind Bahrain, Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE) according to the study. However, Kuwait also featured high on the list of countries with fluctuating medium and long-term growth, behind Djbouti and Lebanon.

The study, revealed at the ongoing Arab Social and Economic Summit, identified the besieged states of Palestine and Iraq as low on the list of human resource development. The two countries will not be able to achieve their development goals by 2015, the study added.

The economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa has been rated as the highest in the world, averaging 3.7 percent per capita annually.

Improvement in salaries, increase of average expected lifetime, improvement in schooling, and the decrease of poverty, death rates, and illiteracy, were some of the factors that emerged during the study.

World Bank also said that 14 percent of the Arab world's population lacked clean drinking water and that 46 percent of Arab children were underweight and suffered from malnutrition.

Redistribution of salaries and the protection of local markets from international competition were the salient features of the social development in the Arab world, the study said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 21, 2009)