Qatar ranks top in the world for creating jobs

By Joseph Varghese/Staff ReporterQatar ranks first in the world for creating employment opportunities for its population, according to a study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The study, named Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA), was conducted among 150 countries around the world considering each country’s well-being and performance according to its income level.Douglas Beal, partner and managing director at BCG Middle East and Global SEDA spokesperson, said: “Our aim with SEDA is to help countries identify key areas of improvement and enhance their social and economic well-being in the long-term by providing them with a framework for comparison. Qatar is setting the pace for many countries, as it has already written its National Development Strategy for 2016, which was developed following extensive research and planning.”He added that the most valuable feature of the study was that it could help policymakers diagnose development priorities by benchmarking themselves against other nations.The study highlights that employment, infrastructure, income, investment capacity, and education are some of the dimensions that have enabled Qatar to rank among the top quartile of the countries in terms of overall well-being of its population.The study also ranks Qatar second in the world in terms of investment capacity which is one of SEDA’s long-term sustainability factors that  measures FDI inflows, natural resources, availability of domestic credit, and gross fixed investments. According to the study, Qatar has also performed well in terms of income dimension, ranking first in the world, attracting many expatriates to join its workforce. Among other parameters, Qatar ranked eighth overall among the 150 nations in terms of the quality and availability of its infrastructure. The efforts that Qatar has put into improving its infrastructure have resulted in making it among the top fifth of countries that have improved their infrastructure over the past five years. Another aspect of the study is that Qatar has been taking important steps to improve the quality of its education, which is critical to ensuring that its graduates have the required skills to fill key positions in the workforce. The report cites that Qatar University continues to add new majors that are in demand by the key employers and enrolled more than 3,000 students in 2012 alone. The employment factor measures employment rates among the working age population as well as the unemployment rates in the country. Qatar has achieved this top ranking on the back of very strong gains in this dimension over the past five years. Employment is a particularly important dimension for Qatar to do well as only 6% of the labour force is made up of Qataris. It is critical that Qatar ensures that its nationals have the ability and the opportunity to take the most critical positions within both the public and private sector. SEDA uses ten dimensions of social and economic development  for the study which are  income, level of employment, income equality, economic stability, the health of the population, the quality of education, governance, environmental stewardship, infrastructure, and civil society  to analyse the current level, recent progress which is over the past five years, and long-term sustainability of each country.