Do Wage Subsidies to Nationals Enhance Their Employability? New Evidence from Kuwait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the persistent unemployment of nationals in the midst of millions of gainfully employed foreign workers, Kuwait, the focus of this study, introduced a new generation of active labor market policies (ALMPs) in 2000, capped by an expansive wage subsidy to nationals who join the private sector. This study employs the Fully Modified Least Square (FM-OLS) model to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies by means of estimating employment elasticities of Kuwaitis in the private sector in response to wage subsidies. The results show that the subsidies have been ineffective, contrary to their well-documented broad positive impact in industrial economies. This outcome has been attributed generally to wage differentials between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis. This study presents a holistic diagnosis of the problem by challenging the received ‘wage differentials’ as the sole cause. It identifies a host of heretofore-unidentified structural disequilibria in the labor market that are responsible for the subsidy’s ineffectiveness such as the local economy’s inherent bias towards low-tech methods of production that rely heavily on low-skilled labor, Kuwaitis’ penchant to pursue higher levels of education, low national participation rates in the labor force, the absence of critical vocational training programs, and the government’s liberal immigration policies. Based on the revised prognosis, a new integrated remedial plan of actionable steps is suggested to address the unemployment problem.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".