E/CN.4/1503
Annex III page 8
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26. The countries supplying the migrant labour are numerous and are as far apart as Afghanistan, the Philippines and the Sudan. The migrant populations in the region (includ- ing those dependants who had joined the breadwinners) were reported by an ILO study based on 1975 findings to include over 655 000 from Egypt, 367 000 from Yemen, 853 000 from Jordan/Palestine and some 700 000 others from other Arab countries. The South Asian sub-continent had provided the next largest group (over 400 000 and
000 and a quarter of a million from Pakistan and India respectively). Several tens of thousands had come from Europe and North America and 16 000 from non-Arab African states.
When some of the capital-surplus oil ex- porters have a reported per capita GNP as high as $ 17 100 (Kuwait) or even $ 8 170 (Libya), the incentives to potential migrants from countries like Egypt ($ 480), India ($ 190) or Sudan ($ 370) are too obvious to need stating.
27. Saudi Arabia, with a central position in the region, large physical size and enormous oil revenues, has attracted the majority of Arab migrant workers. (over 700 000), while Asian migrants - now coming from as far away as Korea, the Philippines and Thailand through the work of national contracting firms are concentrated in the countries of the Arabian Gulf to which they have easy access and/or in which economc development is most recent. The migrant workers are predominantly male, and unskilled or semi-skilled, though attraction to the region of skilled and professionally-trained people has been marked enough for the loss of human capital to represent a problem for some of
of the countries supplying the migrants. Far from relieving unemployment, the loss of skilled people may indeed perpetuate or even create unemployment by crippling the most dynamic sectors of their own economies. It is reported that carpenters, electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, masons and other skilled workers in the construction trades are in short supply throughout the Middle East. The construction phase of the oil countries'
countries' industrialization drive has stripped the surrounding countries of more of these workers than they can afford to lose.
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