99

Kuwait is a country which is quite small, but very rich. It is situated at the north end of the Persian Gulf, near Iraq and it has a population of a million. This small desert country is one of the world’s leading oil producers and it has about 15 percent of the world’s known oil stores.
     Since the discovery of oil in 1938, Kuwait’s rulers have turned the country into a welfare state. It has free primary and secondary education, free health care and social services, and the Kuwaitis do not have to pay any personal income tax for those services. The rate of literacy is high and constantly growing. The University of Kuwait was opened in 1966, but many of the Kuwaiti students still study in colleges and universities abroad, at state’s expenses.
     Kuwait is an Arab country and about 99 percent of the people who live there are Moslems. But 45 percent of these ’Moslems are not actually citizens of Kuwait. This is because there are many Moslem immigrants living and working there. The other 1 percent of the population, in other words the non-Moslems, are recent immigrants from America who were attracted by the opportunities to work for oil companies. There are several thousand Europeans and Americans in Kuwait. Many of them are employed by the oil companies.