700,000 Reasons Why Jobs Will Miss Saudi Arabia’s Target

(Bloomberg) -- The Saudi government’s National Transformation Program, a set of development objectives for 2020, aims to cut the unemployment rate to 9 percent, a reduction that would require the creation of at least 700,000 jobs in the next two years, according to Bloomberg Economics. That’s unlikely to be achieved and the government now thinks it’s a tall order as in the 2018 budget statement it projected that joblessness would fall to 10.6 percent by 2020. Even that forecast is optimistic too: It requires the creation of around 600,000 jobs -- a goal unlikely to be met given the current economic conditions.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ziad Daoud (Economist) in Dubai at zdaoud1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Zoe Schneeweiss at zschneeweiss@bloomberg.net, Sheldon Reback

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