Unemployment in Syria

The BBC correspondent in Damascus said that the volume of unemployment in Syria reached for 1999, 432, 000 unemployed while the figure was only 88,000 in 1970.

In a message from Damascus she sent on Friday, the correspondent added that the Syrian authorities have to ensure some 600,000 job opportunities that might cost the government a sum of USD 1.6 billion.

The Syrian economist Nabil Marzouq said that the inability of the Syrian economy to create new job opportunities and also the inability of the private sector to ensure job opportunities had created a sort of imbalance between "offer and request" for the labor force, the increase in unemployment rate and number of the unemployed as well as a recession in the volume of investment in Syria and the effect of the wave of drought.

Marzouq continued that the government has not allotted any sums and allocations in the state's general budget for this year. A thing which indicates that there is no real intention in the state to start dealing with the employment.

New statistics expected that 300,000 workers to join the labor market annually, especially among youths.