"Standard & Poor's Global" credit rating agency revealed that the population of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries decreased by about 4 percent last year as a result of the exodus of expatriates following the outbreak of the Coronavirus crisis and the drop in oil prices.
Standard & Poor's expects the continued decline in the number of foreigners in the region until 2023 due to the decline in the growth of the non-oil sector and the nationalization policies.
The Gulf countries depend a lot on foreign workers in various sectors such as financial services, health care and construction, but efforts to localize jobs to combat the rise in unemployment among citizens have accelerated in recent years. According to Standard & Poor's, it is unlikely that the total population of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries will return to the level of 2019 of 57.6 million before 2023. It is feared that these changes will have repercussions on the regional economy and pose additional challenges for diversification away from its heavy dependence on the hydrocarbon sector in the long term, if not matched by economic and social reforms that nurture human capital.
Source (London-based Arab Newspaper, Edited)
