There are ongoing demonstrations and sit ins down in Ta’izz because of the awful economic situation. The protesters are demanding that there be no more corruption when it comes to allocating government jobs, that the government do something to help college graduates find jobs, and to alleviate poverty in general.
I don’t have any hard proof of this, but it certainly seems that the government sector is a large part of the economy here. It certainly is in Sana’a. The problem is that the government sector doesn’t actually add to the productivity, and hence to wealth creation, of the country. Everyone here aspires to get a job in the government. The government does seem to pay better than most of the private sector jobs. That in itself could be a problem, if most of the capable people are in the government, the private sector doesn’t have much to pick from. In addition, the government sector “crowds out” many things that could be provided by the private sector, thus robbing the country of the greater efficiency and productivity that a for profit enterprise generates. Because government jobs are so popular, there are many more people applying for them than there are positions. People being people, where there is a demand, there will be an entrepreneur to take advantage of that demand. It is very common to have to pay very high prices in order to land the government job that you want. As long as there are long lines of people wanting these jobs, corruption will take advantage of that demand. The only way to get rid of this problem is to make the private sector more attractive and more lucrative. More pro-growth and smaller government policies need to be followed…
There is an ongoing problem with people graduating from colleges and then not being able to find a job. Most of this can be blamed on the continuing pathetic performance of the economy. More than a third of Yemenis are out of work so it’s no surprise that college graduates are among those. The other significant problem is that there are very few people coming out of Yemeni colleges with “useful” degrees. A startling percentage of graduates come out of college with a degree in Arabic. I think the number is well over 50%, many of the other people get degrees in English. There are a vanishingly small percentage of graduates in the sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and business. I’m not even sure that there is an equivalent of Engineering offered here. There are people with an “engineering” degree, but they seem to know little more than a contractor would know back home. They can build structures, but they cannot seem to tackle more difficult projects like tall buildings, bridges, roads, or dams. If you want one of those things built, you have to import an actual engineer… Yemenis could really help themselves if they started to pursue degrees in fields that have to be imported now…
The government can’t really alleviate poverty, but it could get out of the way. Curiously, no one seems to be asking for that. Instead, the protesters are demanding that the government do “something” about poverty. People need to understand that governments can’t create wealth, they can only take it away. With a minimal government footprint in people’s lives, they should be able to go about being productive in whatever ways they can think of. The cynic in me realizes that this is not what Yemenis want. They want the government to wave a magic wand and suddenly become like their neighbors in Qatar, the UAE, and of course like KSA. It’s too bad that the only wealth that they are familiar with is from an abundance of a very desirable natural resource. It never crosses their mind to wonder why the US is so rich, let alone Hong Kong or Taiwan. The US certainly has plenty of natural resources, but that is not why we are rich. Good old fashioned hard work and savings over the course of the past 400 years has produced what we have today. The Yemenis would do well to study places like Taiwan in order to become wealthy, not Qatar. Until they start to ask the government to allow them to prosper by their own cunning, they will always be poor.