As COVID-19 and low oil prices continue to rattle Gulf economies, the Prime Minister of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Khalid Al Hamad Al Al-Sabah, said that the country's expatriate population needs to be reduced to 30 percent of the total.

"The ideal population structure is to have Kuwaitis being 70 percent and non-Kuwaitis 30 percent, so we have a big challenge in the future, which is to address the discrepancy in the population," the prime minister said in a meeting with the top editors of local newspapers.

Foreigners account for nearly 3.4 million of Kuwait’s 4.8 million people. The population structure needs time to be solved and it should be divided into phases until reaching a final adjustment to the population in future, he said.

Lawmakers in the Gulf state have been pushing to reduce the number of expatriates in the country, particularly unskilled workers.

Amidt a strained economy, Kuwaiti MPs have made proposals for a quota system for expatriate communities and for replacement of all expatriate government employees, estimated at 100,000, with Kuwaitis.

MP Safaa Al-Hashem recently called for an end to the infiltration of expatriates into sensitive positions and their control of the governmental decisions.

(Writing by Seban Scaria, editing by Daniel Luiz)

(seban.scaria@refinitiv.com)

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