If investment in the EEC countries has been the major preoccupation of the international business community in the 1960's, contracting in the Arab states seems to become one of the major trends of the 1970's. The need for multicountry business and tax information was felt simultane­ ously. Language difficulties, scarcity of legal and other sources, distance and, most of all, the novelty of business expansion in this direction made such information still more necessary than in the European or inter­ American setting. A few symposiums were held, corporate and tax laws were translated, research studies were initiated, among which the book of Mr and Mrs SIIILLING on Doing Business in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf States, a rich mine of general business information. I was therefore very pleased when Mrs CLERIN, completing her tax studies at Ecole Superieure des Sciences Fiscales in Brussels, mentioned that she was going to live in the Middle East, had the opportunity to work with a well-known international accounting firm and proposed to focus her final dissertation at the School on the tax planning of operations in Arab countries. She devoted months of research to the study of sources both in Middle East and in industrial­ ized Western countries, to come up with a true planning study, clear, readable and practical. The description of the tax and corporate structure of the operating territories will be found in the first half of the book.