KUWAIT CITY, Feb 18: Unemployment among Gulf nationals is expected to rise after years of decline due to the impact of the global economic crisis on the oil-rich region, a Kuwaiti bank said on Wednesday.

Fiscal constraints would likely prevent governments from creating jobs for new entrants into the labour market and the private sector’s ability to create jobs would be curtailed by the economic downturn, National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) said in a report.

“Overall, 2009 looks set to represent a challenging year for private sector employment,” the report said.

Due to the huge windfall from oil revenues in the past

five years, public and private sectors in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) created a large number of jobs for both nationals and expatriates.

Based on 2007 data, a total of 14 million people were employed in GCC countries, of whom 18 per cent or 2.5 million were nationals and the rest foreigners, the report said.

The public sector employed about 1.8 million people, 80 per cent of them nationals. The public sector also accounted for 58 per cent of all nationals employed and the private sector the remaining 42 per cent, NBK said.The GCC comprises of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The unemployment rate among nationals was cut to 3.2 per cent in 2008 from 3.6 per cent in 2007, NBK said.—AFP