How could this be, in a region where the oil price is soaring unbelievably high, gushing floods of dollars (devalued, but still dollars) into government budgets and investment funds?

There are three answers to that. The first is what economists now call the Dutch disease, after what happened to the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s when the bonanza of North Sea gas not only spawned inflation and wage rises but began to shrink the underlying real economy. The Dutch disease, which is now stalking Russia, has not really hit the Arab oil-exporting economies because they had so little underlying real economy to start with.

The second answer is so much of the labor force is imported, from American engineers to British teachers, German doctors to Pakistani and Indian laborers. The education, training and motivation of the home-grown workforce have been a constant and depressing disappointment.

There are exceptions: some first-class Arab managers and strategic planners, financial entrepreneurs and dealmakers. But in terms of building a real economy that makes things that people want to buy, from cars to processed foods, microchips to pipelines, textiles to furniture, the Gulf states have a very long way to go.

The third answer is implicit in the figures that spell out this week's bad news. It comes in the form of a report from the Conference Group and the Gulf Investment Corporation and it says that since this decade started seven years ago productivity has fallen in the Gulf states.

That means that the average employee is creating less wealth now than he did in the year 2000, a period when United States productivity was growing at a steady 2.6 percent a year. Compounded, that means that the average American worker is producing almost 20 percent more now per dollar of pay and investment than he was in 2000. In China, where productivity has been growing at 7 percent to 20 percent a year, the average Chinese worker is producing more than twice as much, and India about 50 percent more.

In the Gulf states, by dismal contrast, productivity outside the oil sector has fallen by 0.2 percent.

"Currently, much of the oil and gas revenues are being spent on low-productivity construction and real estate, which give only a superficial impression of affluence," the report says.

Ironically, the countries that did best in the productivity ranks were those like Bahrain and Oman, with relatively less dependence on the energy sector. They live in the real world. If and when oil prices fall again, they will have something to fall back on. The Gulf states won't.