Let’s say over a year ago that economists expressed the cold, hard truth to the rulers in Saudi Arabia that expat workers meet the demands of the Saudi job market better than Saudi graduates do – so much so that foreigners dominate the job market in not only manual labor, but also specialist and professional jobs.  In addition, over 140 billion riyal (37B USD) was spent on expat labor in 2014.  What could be done to solve this problem? Well, step one was to force-feed Saudis into the telecom sector without a proper transition period or training.  When forced Saudization was found to be unsuccessful, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development closed over 1,000 mobile phone shops, issued warnings to 174 others, and asked a special committee to take punitive action against a total of 1,809 shops.  Nothing like the heavy hand of government compliance to spur job growth. (Amazingly, another 13,000-plus shops were judged to have met the...(Read Full Post)