As the spotlight falls on the private sector, an attractive pay packet won’t necessarily tempt locals into jobs.
There are certainly many initiatives in place for increasing the number of nationals in employment, but whether nationalisation is a magic bullet for the region’s workforce issues is more heavily contested. A 2012 paper by Kasim Randeree, at the time a senior researcher at Saïd Business School and Kellogg College, University of Oxford – Workforce Nationalization in the Gulf Cooperation Council States – noted that much of the current literature on the topic focused on the causes and means of nationalisation schemes, with only a limited body of evidence existing to shape the success of such programmes.
“Education, training, the transfer of knowledge from expatriate to citizen, better approaches to encouraging citizens into the private sector and the greater inclusion of women are all significant issues that need to be tackled to fulfil the desired goal of nationalising the labour force across all GCC states,” says Randeree.