The latest Arab Development Report, the third in a series, continues its harsh critique of Arab governments.
Pulling no punches, it says: "The modern Arab state ... resembles a black hole, which converts its surrounding environment into a setting in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes."
The report carries all the more weight because it was written by an independent group of leading Arab scholars and intellectuals, sponsored by the UN Development Programme and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.
"Why, among all the regions of the world, do Arabs enjoy the least freedom?" the authors ask. "What has led Arab democratic institutions - where they exist - to become stripped of their original purpose to uphold reform?"
Contrary to the theories of some foreign analysts, the report argues that the reasons are not cultural, but political. The decades-long concentration of political power in the hands of the executive - whether this is a monarch, a military dictatorship, or a civilian president elected without competition - has created a "black hole" at the centre of Arab political life, it says.
However, in the Times, Bronwen Maddox notes that, like many such reports, it is better at analysis of the problem than it is at scripting a solution.
The report urges Arab leaders to redistribute power to their people, but Maddox notes that it does not say why they might do this, or how others could encourage them to do so. "It is the bleaker parts of its analysis which dominate," she concludes.
Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden and US special envoy to the Balkans, is slightly more optimistic than Maddox. He quotes the report as saying that "there is a strong awareness of the irreversibility of change - change driven by the Arab street, not change adopted from afar." For Bildt, things could be worse - in fact, they "used to be far worse".
According to the International Herald Tribune, the Bush administration reportedly threatened to pull funding for the UN development programme if the authors of the report did not leave out criticism of the US invasion of Iraq, which they argued "only served to impede Arab human development".
