Abstract
This Chapter uses some secondary data and the macro and firm surveys (Firm Survey. (2002, April). Technological change and skill development: A comparative study of chemical and metal medium and large scale enterprises in the UAE. UAE: Firm Survey) to analyse the educational, training and skill development policies in the Gulf countries. We show that despite the enormous variation in the supply–demand sides of educational policies across the Gulf countries, but the educational policies in the Gulf countries shared several problematic features such as the poor quality, insufficient supply (spending) and demand (enrolment) and the biased structure of tertiary education. We corroborate hypothesis 8 concerning the need for skill and technological upgrading through the reform of the educational and training systems and the transfer of knowledge. We show that the improvement of the educational systems in the Gulf countries is vital and requires improvement of the quality/internal efficiency, supply (investment) and demand (enrolment) sides, particularly by increasing incentives at tertiary and technical education. We show that from the macro–micro views skill development depends on: reforming the educational system; enhancing the provision of training; planning skill needs and matching educational output with market needs; enhancing the transfer of knowledge/schooling effect; and incentives and collaboration between public and private institutions and increasing incentives for private sector investment in education and training in the UAE. We explain that the promotion of local technologies and adoption of appropriate foreign technologies and the interaction between both these to foster economic growth in the UAE depends on skill development. Our results show a serious discrepancy with respect to the implementation of public policies of training and skill upgrading between private and large public firms and divergence in arranging priorities to implement plans, mechanisms and policies for enhancing skill levels, provision of training and transfer of knowledge at the macro–micro levels. Therefore, we recommend further efforts be made to enhance the consistency between the macro–micro views and the public-private sectors, particularly in the arrangement of priorities, plans and mechanisms to ensure more consistent, effective and successful policies for skills development. We confirm our hypothesis 8 that the effective institutional environment and consistent policies of public and private institutions will enhance upskilling plan and skill development.
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Notes
- 1.
Al-Sulayti (2002, p. 15) indicates the insufficient laws/regulations regarding compulsory education attendance.
- 2.
See the UNESCO Education Statistics: UNESCO- UIS (2004a) UIS web site global statistics on education: www.unesco.org.
- 3.
The applicants who passed the exams.
- 4.
See the Ministry of Education in Bahrain State (1995–1996) Unpublished Report in Al-Sulayti. (2002, p. 28).
- 5.
“Probably, the low enrolment at secondary level is attributed to high drop out in transition from primary to secondary schooling and lack of effective actions in educational policy to legitimize the compulsory education” (Al-Sulayti, 2002, p. 15).
- 6.
“The irrelevant wrong policy for admission in higher education leads to focus on humanities and social science and biases against science, technology and engineering studies leads to mismatch, unemployment, shortage of technical skills that leads to dependence on foreign technical skills” (Al-Sulayti, 2002, pp. 16–18). “The low share of enrolment in technical education relative to total enrolment in tertiary education, is probably attributed to both social/cultural aspect in the society that discourage the involvement in technical work and the weak relationship between educational policies and development planning” (Alfakhery, 1999, p. 82).
- 7.
The scarcity of reliable information limited our analysis from discussing two interesting issues related to educational policies: the contribution of private sector in both spending and enrolment in tertiary education; and the enrolment of the citizens from the Gulf countries in overseas educational institutions. The high GDP per capital has encouraged a considerable number of the citizens from the Gulf countries to seek higher education abroad. The only available information indicates that during the period 1999–2002/2003 the number of students from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman who study in the United States declined by 31 %, 26 % and 25 % respectively – see the UNDP – AHDR (2003, Table 1, p. 23). This may substantiate the need for improving domestic higher educational institutions to fill the gap and absorb the students who have returned.
- 8.
No relevant data and information are available to allow an assessment of the quality of tertiary education.
- 9.
“The poor quality is attributed to: (a) High repetition rates, for instance, repetition rate at primary level for female in Saudi Arabia is around 14 %, at some secondary level in Kuwait increased to 31 % and at industrial education level in Bahrain increased to 38 %. (b) Weak absorptive capacity and performance level of students at all levels. (c) Failure of educational strategy to motivate innovative skills and problem solving ability/skills. (e) Weak monitoring and examination systems due to traditional, inefficient and subjective assessment methods and lack of international recognition/ bases. (f) Lack of monitoring systems/ institutions to measure and assess the performance of educational and training institutions” (Al-Sulayti, 2002, pp. 21–24).
- 10.
In most of the Gulf countries – Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE – both the educational and training institutions are integrated within one entity administered by the ministries of education, whereas in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait the technical education and training are administered by independent institutions headed by the minister of labour and social affairs and the minister of education respectively (Al-Sulayti, 2002, p. 20).
- 11.
For instance, the selected three largest public firms have several common characteristics such as large market size, namely size of employment, capital (local capital), market, products, sales, sales revenues; investment in ICT, use of advanced technologies and active R&D/technology development unit.
- 12.
From the results of the firm survey (2002) and the selected three cases of large public firms studied in this chapter, it may be true that public firms are systematically larger than private firms. It is therefore plausible to expect that the large public firms to have higher financial capacity to support training and skill upgrading than private firms. However, it is less clear and hard to make generalization to conclude whether this applies to all other public firms as well, because the available information for the UAE indicate the classification of firms according to size, activities and ownership (nationality of main owner(s)) rather than public- private sectors.
- 13.
As reported by 86 % of the respondents firms.
- 14.
As indicated by 61 % of the respondents firms.
- 15.
As reported by 97 %, 93 %, 93 %, 83 %, 79 %, 79 %, 76 % and 72 % of the respondent policy makers and experts respectively.
- 16.
As indicated by 86 %, 83 %, 83 %, 83 %, 69 % and 55 % of the respondent policy makers and experts respectively.
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Nour, S.M. (2013). Education, Training and Skill Development Policies in the Gulf Countries: Macro–Micro Overview. In: Technological Change and Skill Development in Arab Gulf Countries. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01916-1_8
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