Saudi Arabia has decided to curb its reliance on foreign labourers and implement a slew of measures to tackle the problem of unemployment in the kingdom.
"The unemployment problem is a major challenge. It cannot be dealt with while the country's doors are open to hundreds of thousands of expatriates every year," Saudi Arabia's Labour Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi was quoted as saying by the Saudi Press Agency on Wednesday.
The minister called for stringent measures to cut the unemployment rate and for reducing the country's addiction to foreign labour saying, "We will implement 26 policies through 108 mechanisms in order to reduce unemployment in the short and long-terms."
Gosaibi attributed the problem to low qualifications of job seekers, incompatibility of their educational qualifications with job-market requirements, lack of readiness on the part of some private companies to apply 'Saudisation policies' and low salaries offered by private firms.
According to figures, the current rate of unemployment in the kingdom stands at 9.1 per cent for men and 26.3 per cent for women. Gosaibi said the number of recruitment visas issued annually has declined from 597,000 in 2002 to 353,000 last year.
Meanwhile, the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council has taken a serious note of the growing joblessness among its nationals.
At a meeting in