With so much easy money coming in these days, oil-rich Arab countries are trying to prove they are just as good at giving it away.

UN officials confirm what Arab spokesmen say – that they are now among the world’s most generous, bankrolling relief efforts for Asian earthquakes, African famines – even American hurricanes. As one example, about 60 percent of the relief for the October 8 Pakistan earthquake came from the Muslim world, much of it from the Persian Gulf, said Omar Shehadeh, Dubai-based fundraising chief of the UN children’s fund.

Saudi Arabia’s annual emergency and development aid has ranged from $750 million to $1.1 billion annually over the past few years, said Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi government adviser. The kingdom also gives around $1.5 billion a year in the form of cheap or free oil to poor countries, Obaid said. The United Arab Emirates gave about $544 million in development aid last year, its Foreign Ministry said.

Overall comparisons are hard to make, in part because the Arabs have tended to give money anonymously to non-UN charities or directly to countries in need, rather than funnel donations through the UN, which has long been distrusted as tool of the West. That view is changing as UN agencies open offices in the Gulf, and figures from one UN agency, the World Food Program, while small, show an unexpected picture.

Already this year, Saudi Arabia’s $15 million in donations to the UN World Food Program has surpassed the $12 million from France and Australia and is not far off Japan’s $21 million. The US contribution is $486 million, 32 times bigger than Saudi Arabia’s, but its is 38 times bigger. Much of the $486 million consists of bulk food deliveries, which are in effect a way of subsidizing US farmers. Charity – called zakkat – is an ancient Islamic imperative. The amount of money given is staggering: $250 billion to $1 trillion a year, according to a report last year from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

After 9/11 the giving became controversial, with the United States saying some charities were funneling donations to Islamic extremists in . The Saudi government shut some charities and began monitoring others, in a campaign the US says has largely been effective.Meanwhile, legitimate donations, private and governmental, keep coming.

Across the Arab world, the overall giving rate in 2002 was 0.85 percent of GDP, said Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, a UN donor liaison for the Gulf, speaking during a 2003 conference.

The US government spends about 0.15 percent of its GDP on development aid, Japan 0.21 percent and Germany 0.32 percent.

UN relief agencies have recently opened several offices in Dubai, which subsidizes them heavily. And in May, the Emirates became the 18th member of the OCHA Donor Support Group, an elite organization of the United States and other wealthy countries.