SAUDI ARABIA: UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN TO 12.6% IN 2020

Thu 01 April 2021:

The unemployment rate among Saudi citizens dropped to 12.6 per cent from 14.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2020, the Kingdom’s General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) announced yesterday.

According to GASTAT, unemployment among Saudi males decreased to 7.1 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with 7.9 per cent in the previous quarter. It added that the rate of unemployment among Saudi women also fell, from 30.2 per cent in the third quarter, to 24.4 per cent, in the final quarter of 2020.

The authority pointed out that the unemployment rate for all residents in the Kingdom, citizens and non-citizens, had dropped from 8.5 to 7.4 per cent during the same period.

GASTAT also said that the participation of all Saudi Arabian citizens in the labour force increased to 51.2 per cent, a slight increase on the 49 per cent of the third quarter. It noted that male participation had increased to 68.5 per cent, while women’s had risen to 33.2 per cent.

“Ninety-three per cent of the survey respondents said that they would accept jobs in the private sector,” GASTAT explained, “while others expressed their rejection of jobs with private companies.”

The Saudi government has been implementing a number of economic reforms since early 2016 in an attempt to provide millions of jobs and reduce the unemployment rate to seven per cent by 2030. However, progress was said to have been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.