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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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