As conflagration centred on Iraq evolves, it’s understandable that the surrounding analytical noise overwhelmingly prioritises matters of military manoeuvres, political history and foreign policy, with much of that relating to past conflicts, sectarian struggles and Western involvement. Such issues run deep and are mired in complication and a multitude of challenging interpretations.
Economic topics seem very secondary by comparison, although inevitably the impact on the oil market has ramifications locally, in terms of the disruption to production and the accrual of earnings to national and other segments, besides its obvious relevance to a world economy still treading uncertainly back towards some pale imitation of normality.
Researchers, though, often draw attention to the importance of promoting convincing means of sustainable economic growth, as the conduit for absorbing the attentions of youthful cohorts in society who otherwise may be drawn outside mainstream, everyday activities. While the geostrategic and internecine dimensions have their undoubted roots and still predominate in discussion, that other aspect doesn’t go away.
There are legion, studious testimonies as to the need to create enhanced employment opportunities and systematised investment around the Gulf and across Mena, beyond simply spending the fruits of the hydrocarbon endowment. The call for a genuine diversification of development, and its implementation in the resource-rich GCC, are sounded so often as to reach the point of tedium.
That message, however, is increasingly being elevated to the status of a shared concern requiring collective, coordinated action by the range of countries of the Arab World, whose supposed Spring of uprisings and dislocations has mutated into other seasonal phases of autumnal or wintry disappointment, and now essentially a summer of renewed heated confrontation.
One such notion of combined attempts by governments to identify aggregate interests and bring regenerative powers to the economies of the Middle East is what has been termed a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the region — one that, whatever its particular definition, is not confined to reconstruction, but tries to organise a broader drive to prosperity and thereby assuage pockets or swathes of discontent.
Finding ways of making wealth circulate more productively, if not evenly, is intuitively a preoccupation worthy of reflection throughout the region, if a certain level of pragmatism can be brought to nations’ affairs, and a sense of common purpose in the pursuit of security and well-being.
Dr Hassan Hakimian, director of the London Middle East Institute (LMEI), SOAS, suggested last week that “regarding a ‘Marshall Plan’, [there is] the argument that a focus on creation of new jobs, while itself very important, should not miss out the importance of preparing a competitive and skilled supply of local workforce in the medium and long term”. Short-term palliatives and horizons will not suffice.
It’s a topic and proposition that’s been on the table a considerable while, chiming with the need to embrace the private sector, in place of, or at least increasingly alongside, what remain the ‘command and control’ instincts of much economic development that relies ultimately on the state and its allocated receipts for successful realisation.
LMEI’s work in this area was recently on display in a conference on demographic change in the GCC states. Its key presentation highlighted International Labour Organization (ILO) data for 2013 showing 21 per cent of Gulf nationals unemployed, compared to just 8 per cent for the overall workforce including expatriates, and observed that it’s “almost certain that true unemployment rates are even higher”, while the existing statistics also “mask low labour force participation rates”.
Underlying those parameters is the ‘bulge’ in the population represented by the relatively young, with a noticeable bias towards male numbers growth currently in the 20s and 30s age bracket.
Naturally some part of the solution to the problem is seen to be job reallocation as well as job creation, i.e. the transferring of employment positions to nationals, given a preponderant reliance on foreign staff and workers across the Gulf. Nationalisation of the labour force has been not only articulated but to some degree officially required and enacted, notably in Saudi Arabia.
To what extent that process can be well applied depends on the ‘elasticity of substitution’, LMEI’s paper says, requiring certain assumptions. As with many academic voices, its conclusions still identify not only the likes of civil service (public sector) retrenchment, vocational training and removing barriers to mobility as necessary steps towards the overall objective, but also the introduction of norms of best-practice as defined at the global level. “GCC countries need to commit to international labour standards to reduce segmentation and improve productivity”, it advised.
Like so many of the difficulties confronting public policy around the world these days, such notions will, even so, go somewhat against the grain of established policies or of popular conceptions and expectations. It’s no surprise, then, when those engaging either with the authorities or with their advisers will tell you that meeting those kinds of challenges is bound to be a protracted exercise.
