By Innovation-sa on January 8, 2018 in News
The General Authority of Statistics (GaStat) Q3 labor report indicated a drop of 5.8 percent in the Kingdom’s overall unemployment rate among Saudis during the third quarter of 2017 in comparison to the second quarter. Although there has been an increase in the number of new jobseekers in the Saudi market, the Kingdom’s unemployment rate remained stable at 12.8 percent. Saudi Arabia now stands 12th among G20 countries in terms of average drop in the rate of unemployment.
The report also indicated that 54.8 percent of the populations are engaged in some sort of economic activities, of which 78.4 percent are males and 19.9 percent are females. Reforms and programmes undertaken by the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA) to empower uplift and support Saudi women to take up jobs succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate among Saudi women to 21.1 percent in third quarter from 22.9 percent in the second quarter.
During the third quarter, there were 1,231,549 unemployed Saudis of which 1,040,727 were women and 190,822 were men.31.3 percent of the overall jobseekers belonged to the highly productive age group of 25-29 years and interestingly, 45.8 percent of the job hunters were university degree holders.
Meanwhile, the GaStat analysis of the third quarter of 2017 indicated that 94,390 foreign employees opted to leave the Kingdom in Q3 of 2017, largely due to Saudization in several job sectors and an exceptional increase in living cost. The number of expats working in the Kingdom’s public and private sector was around 10.79 million in Q2 which reduced to 10.6 million in Q3.
The number of visas issued during the third quarter of 2017 totalled 509,180 with 22.3 percent visas issued in the public sector and 39.9 percent in the private sector. Around 37.8 percent visas were issued to recruit domestic employees.
Source
http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/525423/SAUDI-ARABIA/Over-94000-expats-left-between-July-Sept