Qatar’s unemployment world’s lowest: Spectator Index

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Doha: Qatar boasts one of the lowest unemployment records in the world, according to the popular stats aggregator Spectator Index.

Spectator Index, on its Twitter account, placed Qatar at the bottom of a list ranking countries’ unemployment rates from highest to lowest.

The list was topped by Nigeria (33.3%), then South Africa (32.7%), Iraq (14.2%), Spain (13.2%), and then Morocco (11.8%) at number five. Qatar’s unemployment rate according to the Spectator Index list was the lowest in the world at 0.1%.

World Bank, the international financial institution, also has Qatar listed as the country with the lowest total percentage of labor force unemployed.

According to World Bank data, Qatar’s unemployment rate has been on the decline throughout the past three decades.

The data reports that Qatar had gone from 0.81% total unemployment in 1991 to 0.17% in 2021.

Qatari e-Government portal Hukoomi reported that in 2021, the State of Qatar ranked 17th out of 64 mostly developed countries in the Competitiveness Index.

The Competitiveness Index ranking was given to Qatar by the Global Competitiveness Year Book for 2021, issued annually by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland.

In the IMD report, Qatar ranked highly in each of economic performance (11), government efficiency (6), and business sector efficiency rank (15).

The ranking was positively affected by a number of factors, among which were the low unemployment rate, consumer price inflation, and the high percentage of each of the government budget deficit surplus; all of which Qatar was ranked first in.

Qatar’s youth unemployment is also among the lowest recorded for the Middle East and North Africa region.

The highest rates, as found by the Brookings Insitution in a 2019 published paper, were in countries as diverse as Palestine (43%), Saudi Arabia (42% among nationals), Jordan (36%), and Tunisia (36 %). Qatar’s youth unemployment rates were found to be lower than the world average, due to the country’s “capacity to absorb young nationals into public sector jobs.”

World Bank figures also side with these findings, with the level of youth unemployment in Qatar recorded at 0.5% of the total population; a global low.

Qatar’s very low youth unemployment figures are an anomaly in the MENA region. In all MENA countries with available data, Brookings noted that youth unemployment rates were higher than the world average of 13%.