Khaleej Times, May 15, 2013
UAE created 1m jobs for expats in last four
years
Staff Reporter
/ 15 May 2013
The International Conference on Labour
Mobility-Enabler for Sustainable Development, which
opened in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, saw some 150
experts, government officials and international
researchers discussing the issue of cross-border
movement of labour and its impact on development.
The conference, being organised under the
auspices of Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan,
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential
Affairs, at the Emirates Centre for Strategic
Studies and Research, saw Saqr Ghobash Saeed
Ghobash, Minister of Labour, read out a speech on
behalf of Shaikh Mansour.
The speech stated: “UAE in particular and the
Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (AGCC) is concerned
over contribution to the international efforts to
upgrade the relationship between immigration and
development, as well as investing knowledge in the
development policies which are related to the
movement of workforce across the borders on national
levels, and within the framework of regional and
international cooperation”.
“The GCC hosts more than 15 million expatriate
labourers, who are contributing to the development
of our national economies. The workers are also
benefiting from the available job opportunities in
upgrading their qualifications, increasing their
incomes, and improving the standard of living.
“In this regard, we should point out that our
country, despite the repercussions of the global
economic crisis, had created almost one million job
opportunities for expatriates in the past four years
from 2009 to 2012,” he said, noting that, this had
contributed to alleviate the aggravating
unemployment on the regional level.
“We absolutely believe that the contribution of
the AGCC in developing the knowledge with the
relationship between immigration and development.
The GCC is the third biggest regional organisation
in terms of financial remittances by expatriates,
that are estimated to be around $80 billion in 2012,
to which the UAE share constituted 24 per cent,
while the total money transfers by expatriates from
the rest of the GCC form 15 per cent of the
international money transfers,” he added.
In the speech, Shaikh Mansour extended thanks to
the partners in the executive council of the GCC
Ministers of Labour, Kingdom of Sweden, Global forum
for Migration and all national and foreign research
centres and universities that contributed in
preparing the valuable research papers, which the
two-day conference will discuss. —
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