Unemployment

Unemployment in Saudi Arabia

student name: Feras Alasmari student ID: LAB427 instructor name: Mr. Zohair Khojah course: macroeconomics

Introduction: A lot of people mix between unemployment rate of a country and all the people that don't have jobs within the same country which is wrong. When calculating the unemployment rate we only consider people with in the labor force. That means when we calculate unemployment rate in Saudi Arabia, we eliminate people under 15 years old (which is the working age in Saudi Arabia) and people who are in an institutional care such as jails, hospitals, etc, for not being among the working age population, and we also eliminate all people that has no interest in or made no effort to find a job as they don't belong to the labor force. After that we have only left with labor force which is divided into two categories which is employed and unemployed. It's easy to understand that to be considered as employed it means that you occupy a certain job. But who are the that are counted as unemployed ? to be defined as unemployed you fall into one of three categories. You either have no work but have made effort to be working within the previous four weeks, or waiting to be called back to a job that you have been laid off from, or waiting to occupy new job within one month (30 days). In this paper, we'll provide some statistics and analytical information related to unemployment in Saudi Arabia in 2013.

Statistics: According to the central department of statistics and information, the population of Saudi Arabia in 2013 is a little below 30 million, 29,994,272 to be exact. of which 11,361,770 are considered as labor force. 10,729,123 of the labor force are considered as employed. And the rest (632,647) are considered as unemployed. We also need to know that the Saudis in the labor force are 5,339,660 both males and females. The employed are 4,717,127 and the unemployed are 622,533. Among Saudi males 3,989,632 are employed against 261,392 whom are unemployed. Among Saudi females only 727,495 are employed, while 361,141 are unemployed. One last important information is the labor force participation rate which is 54%. Numbers included in these statistics are during June 2013.

Analytical information: With these information we can analyze a lot of things related to labor in Saudi Arabia. The information shows that 84.5% of the labor force are males. A percentage of 94.4% of the labor force are employed. We can also realize that about 9.5 million of the working age population are not in the labor force, that’s nearly half ! which is a large rate no comparison needed. We can also see that only 47% of the labor force are Saudis and only 44% of the employed are Saudis, which gives an idea about how multi-cultured is work in this country. But what we really are curious about is two things, which are the unemployment rate and the employment to population ratio. Given these numbers, the unemployment rate in Saudi Arabia is 5.6%, which is considered a mid point given the unemployment rates of Saudi Arabia between 1999 and 2013. And the unemployment rate among Saudis is 11.7%, which is twice the total unemployment rate. And the employment to population ratio which is near to 51% when compared to labor force participation rate which is 54% gives an indicator of high employment rate.

Resources: text book: macroeconomics by Michael Parkin http://www.cdsi.gov.sa/index.php http://www.cdsi.gov.sa/dmdoc/manpower201302/Pages/MajorFeatures.htm http://www.tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/unemployment-rate