Arab unemployment problem looms

The director of the Arab Labor Organization, Bakr Mahmoud Rasoul, expected that the volume of the unemployed labor will be 100 million people by the year 2000 and 125 million people by the year 2010, which will necessitate providing 2.5 million new job opportunities annually to offset this growth in unemployment.

He added that the unemployment rate in the Arab world is 14%, and the rate is expected to get higher in the Gulf countries which will need to create more than 300,000 new job opportunities a year for their citizens. The Arab labor force currently numbers 80 million people, compared to 64 million people in 1992.