Qatar has an unemployment rate of just 0.1%.

A recent report by a prominent statistics aggregator has revealed Qatar has the lowest unemployment record in the world.

In Spectator Index’s ranking of countries’ unemployment rates, with the highest at the top and the lowest at the bottom, Qatar takes the bottom spot, with an unemployment rate of just 0.1%.

This is in stark contrast to the top five countries on the list, which are Nigeria (33.3%), South Africa (32.7%), Iraq (14.2%), Spain (13.2%), and Morocco (11.8%).

The World Bank also lists Qatar as having the lowest percentage of unemployed people in the labour force. World Bank data indicates that the nation’s unemployment rate has been declining over the last thirty years, dropping from 0.81% in 1991 to 0.17% in 2021.

Furthermore, the Qatari e-Government portal Hukoomi reports that the Gulf peninsula also ranked 17th out of 64 mostly developed countries in the 2021 Competitiveness Index.

The Global Competitiveness Yearbook 2021, issued annually by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland, gave Qatar this ranking based on a variety of factors, including economic performance (11), government efficiency (6), and business sector efficiency rank (15).

Qatar’s low unemployment rate, low consumer price inflation, and high government budget surplus all contributed to the country’s high ranking.

In addition, the country has one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the Middle East and North Africa region.

According to a 2019 published paper by the Brookings Institution, Palestine (43%), Saudi Arabia (42% among nationals), Jordan (36%), and Tunisia (36%) have the highest youth unemployment rates in the region. Meanwhile, Qatar’s youth unemployment rates are lower than the global average due to the country’s “capacity to absorb young nationals into public sector jobs.”

The World Bank’s figures also support this finding, reporting that the level of youth unemployment is only 0.5% of the total population, which is a global low.

Qatar’s very low youth unemployment figures are an anomaly in the MENA region. In all MENA countries with available data, Brookings noted that youth unemployment rates were higher than the world average of 13%.