Salaries falling behind inflation

FALLING BEHIND: Two-thirds of employees in the MENA region think their salaries are not keeping up with inflation, according to the bayt.com survey. (Getty Images)

Almost two-thirds of employees in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) think their salaries are not rising fast enough to keep up pace with inflation, a Middle East employment portal said in a survey released on Sunday.

Inflation is soaring across the Middle East, jumping to a more than 30-year peak in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, and a 19-year peak in Egypt, the most-populous Arab nation.

In its May consumer confidence index, bayt.com found that 63 percent of respondents said their salaries were not keeping up with inflation.

Bayt.com collected responses from April 7 to May 18 from 13,026 respondents in the Gulf Arab region, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco Tunisia, Algeria and Pakistan.

In the United Arab Emirates, where inflation probably hit 11.4 percent last year according to a Reuters poll in May, 61 percent of respondents said their salaries were too low -- up from 51 percent in January, bayt.com said.

The survey was conducted in conjunction with YouGovSiraj, part of British market research firm YouGov. (Reuters)

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Surveys should generally tell us something we don't already know
Posted by Hussain on Sunday 15 June 2008 at 22:31 UAE time


You didn't really need a mass survey to work this one out, but it's good it was done I suppose. Will it have a profound effect on private sector salaries in the near future? Probably not. Will employees carry on jumping ship for better pay like rats out of a sinking ship? Probably. Will I stop commenting on this website by ending in questions? Probably, one day I hope.

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