FT's articles on Arab youth

There's an interesting series on youth in the Arab world on the Financial Times website (though there are restrictions for non-subscribers), focusing particularly on unemployment and the mismatches betwen education and the labour market. In an overview, Roula Khalaf notes that the picture is rather less gloomy than it was five years ago when a landmark World Bank report was published, which estimated that by 2020, 100 million jobs would need to be created in the Middle East and North Africa by 2020. At that time, economic growth was only 3.6 per cent, and the overall unemployment rate of 15 per cent was much higher among the "youth bulge". There has been something of a turnaround since: "The higher rates of annual growth – more than 5 per cent region-wide but nearly double digits in some Gulf states – have started to generate jobs, with regional unemployment estimated to have dropped to about 12.7 per cent."

However, "anxiety over youth unemployment remains the most nagging concern as experts find that new jobs are going to foreign workers in the thriving construction industry or tend to be in the informal sector, leading to seasonal rather than sustainable employment".

The countries featured in the package of reports include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Algerian, Bahrain and Palestine. The FT recently co-hosted a conference in Qatar on youth.