مركز البحوث والدراسات

The book is a unique encyclopedia in its comprehensiveness, all its subjects and the prevailing international trends. It offers a comprehensive view of the reality of the world, the changes taking place at all the political, economic, social, technological, environmental and diplomatic levels, in addition to studies and statistics.
The book was the cooperation result of a group of researchers, academics and specialists, and it included 52 analytical research articles, addressed to different Arab and international topics. The articles included data and tables only published by the Arab Thought Foundation in order to enrich the book and inform the reader, and these tables covered the rates of development for the year 2008 and for the past ten years. The articles were distributed on five central themes: new international relations, economic and social issues, communities and human development, environment and modern technology, and regional challenges.
The Arabic version included about 192 digital tables, composing a full and updated database for the year 2007-2008 for each of the States, citing the website's “Encyclopedia of the State of the World”. These tables also included the demographic field (population, population density, annual growth, fertility index, child mortality, life expectancy, the proportion of urban population). It includes the social cultural field dealing with the indicators of human development, the number of doctors, the proportion of illiteracy, the expected number of years of education, the proportion enrolled in both secondary and university education, the proportion of Internet use and the number of books published in each country. The military field included the number of actual air, land and sea military forces, while the economic field included different indicators, such as the sum of the total GDP of the countries, the annual growth, the GDP percent per individual, the investment rate, the proportion of GDP research, the inflation rates, the expenses of education and defense, and the value of total external debt ... etc., as well as the indicators of foreign exchange rates, which addressed the terms of import and export and the most prominent importing and exporting countries…, etc..
The Professor of political sciences at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, one of the main authors of the “State of the World”, Bertrand Paddy of French nationality, wrote in the book an intervention entitled “A world in trouble: No change in total change”. He discussed the tensioned situation in the world and the highlighted problems facing the new millennium. He focused on the institutional crisis that manifests itself by reducing the role of the state and put it away from the social, educational and cultural field, and stripping it of its sovereign attributes and concomitant lessening of the value of the state and the idea of public work itself. He also turned to the loss of the new conservative credibility, and considered that the doctrine of the “democratization” did not find convincing outlet, and that the gap between thought and reality is widening, indicating that the inability of producing new insights and thinking reform led the international game to a stalemate.
“State of the World 2008” had brought together a rich variety of figures, tables and data achieved by countries in the world of the rates of development in the human, cultural, educational, economic, and commercial fields. It also contained a collection of studies and deep research written by a number of specialists on the most important issues and events of the year 2007, and it also included a number of important topics counting: international system, World Bank, Russian ambition, climate, desertification, drugs, Euro, digital age, environment, emerging powers, China's economic strength, health and environment, in addition to data and tables that keep pace with rates of development in the countries of the world in the year 2007.