How bad is the problem of unemployment in the Middle East?
Ahmed El Sayed el Nagar: The unemployment problem in Egypt and, generally speaking, in the Arab world, is one of the problems that will have substantial political, economic and social impacts on the region’s future. While the official number of unemployed is 17 million and represents 14 percent of the workforce in the Arab population, independent surveys find that number to be double — that is, 35 million in the Arab world. The problem of unemployment is not only the underutilization of capital and natural resources but also of human beings. These people have hate in their hearts because they have had the appropriate education, had parents who spent the money to educate them, and yet the government failed to create the jobs for these new graduates. Particularly because the number of unemployed youth (aged 15 to 40) represents 99 percent of the total unemployed, and the educated represent 88 percent of the unemployed. So we are wasting the money spent by the government and by their fam
