Despite the massive cash flows earned in oil exports by GCC countries, unemployment rate among its youth has reached up to 15 percent in some member countries.

To address the serious unemployment problem, Qatar is hosting a workshop tilled "exchanging experiences in resolving unemployment" in the period October 21-23.

The event is organised by the Urban Planning and Development Authority's general secretariat and the Permanent Population Committee in collaboration with the GCC General Secretariat and will be attended by decision markers in the GCC member states, experts, the Kuwaiti Arab Planning Institute and Bahrain Centre for Studies and Researches.

The workshop comes as an implementation to the recommendations adopted in the 24th meeting of the GCC Committee of Undersecretaries and planning and development organs held here in May. Several topics including local and international definition of unemployment and its rates in each Gulf state will be discussed by participants.

The event will also try to discover employment opportunity available in each gulf country and ways of filling it with the GCC local workforce.

Organisers agreed that unemployment in the GCC member states is mostly caused by the slowness in diversifying economical activity, the general tendency to recruiting foreign labour, the lack of producing education outputs that meet the demand of the gulf labour market and the difference in wages between the employees of the public and private sectors.

The recommendations announced in the workshop will be used to conduct in-depth studies on the causes of unemployment in GCC member states and its social , economic and security impacts.

GCC countries are requested to secure 300,000 high-quality private sector jobs annually at twice the current salaries, according to an estimate by global management group, McKinsey & Company

Unofficial estimates put overall unemployment in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Oman at 15 per cent or more and unemployment in the 16 years-24 years age group at a shocking 35 per cent plus.

Many young GCC nationals are either out of work or underemployed because the educational system had failed to prepare them for the private sector. During oil booms in previous decades, GCC nationals were given high-paying jobs in government agencies or government-owned companies, but these jobs are now saturated," said Kito de Boer, Director, McKinsey & Company's Dubai office.

He said the problem was further compounded by the fact that the GCC has one of the world's youngest and fastest growing populations. In Saudi Arabia, 61 per cent of the population is under 25 years of age, compared to half of India's and 39 per cent of China's.

Source:  The Peninsula, Qatar