For my dissertation I look at a fair amount of Saudi labor statistics, which have attracted a bit of media coverage of late – the General Authority for Statistics delayed the release of the Q3 2020 labor market report several times “to ensure that the data collected… are up to the standards GASTAT is committed to.”
Now that the data has been released (showing a slight drop in the unemployment rate, from 15.4% to 14.9%), I’ve compiled a quick overview of the last few years of statistics. Jobs creation has been a key metric of success for Saudi Arabia’s economic reforms (“SAUDI CROWN PRINCE’S LEGACY RESTS ON RISKY JOB REFORMS,” FT, England and Omran 2020) so it’s worth seeing what the numbers tell us.
That said, even at their best these statistics can be a bit… opaque. Saudi government agencies did not regularly publish a measure of unemployment rates until the 21st century, and changes in methodology make it hard to compared numbers over time. Most recently, in 2016, GASTAT transitioned from estimating the size of the labor force through surveys to measuring employment through the registration of employees with the General Organization for Social Insurance (private sector) and the Civil Service (mostly public sector, some state-owned enterprises. This means that current numbers are only comparable as far back as late 2016; other measures start appearing more recently.
Thoughts? There is certainly more I could go into here (wages by age, unemployment rates by age cohort, public vs private-sector employment by region) and maybe I’ll come back to this in the days ahead.
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