Four years have passed since Vision 2030 was launched by the Saudi Crown Prince in 2017, who assumed the mandate of his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz.
His plan seemed to fail, not in the results, but in the goals that he had announced in his vision project. The failure of the goals, of course, is always followed by the collapse of the plan.
Mohammed bin Salman joined politics in 2016, promising a major qualitative shift in the Kingdom’s economy by 2030, via a set of promising plans, while imprisoning everyone who does not approve of his policies.
All economic indicators revealed that four years after the failure of his plans, the failure actually lays in the mentality of the leader of the vision.
1- The Saudization of sectors did not limit the increasing unemployment rates
The most prominent promises of the Saudi Crown Prince on the day he announced Vision 2030 were to reduce unemployment rates and provide hundreds of thousands of job opportunities through new projects, which he said were part of his “innovative plan”.
However, unemployment rates continue to rise to record levels, reaching 15% this year, despite the Saudization of many job sectors in the Kingdom and the termination of contracts for thousands of foreign employees living in Saudi Arabia, since the Saudization system means the settlement of the employment of Saudi people in government and private jobs, and prioritizing them.
This policy that bin Salman excessively applied did not have any positive impact on unemployment rates, which continued to rise, and its negative effects increased after the Kingdom’s markets lost the qualified and experienced residents who left the country, and according to official Saudi Statistics Authority, 234.2 thousand foreign workers left the labor market during the first quarter of 2018, with the beginning of the implementation of the rule of Saudization.
Unemployment rates announced by the General Authority for Statistics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are the highest in the past twenty years, as these indicators reached 11.6% during 2016 when the Saudi Crown Prince started engaging in the Kingdom’s political affairs.
Economic reports made it clear that residents leaving their jobs and leaving the Kingdom did not solve the unemployment crisis because seemed that the decision to terminate hundreds of thousands of resident contracts came only after an economic crisis hit the markets, and caused the closure of thousands of companies, due to their failure to pay dues and achieve profits, as well as the fleeing of many for fear of the Crown Prince’s involvement in businessmen and partnerships in the Kingdom after taking office.
