THREE ESSAYS ABOUT THE KUWAITI LABOR MARKET: POLICIES FOR LABOR MARKET INTEGRATION AND PAY DIFFERENTIAL BASED ON GENDER AND CITIZENSHIP

This dissertation consists of three essays about the labor market of Kuwait. After Kuwaiti independence in 1961 and the oil boom in the 1970’s, there was a great need for workers to help develop the country and build its infrastructure. The demand for labor was higher than the total labor supply in the country, comprising both Kuwaiti and non-Kuwaiti workers, at that time. Thus, the excess demand was satisfied by importing labor from abroad, such that these foreign workers filled important niches in the economy as skilled and unskilled workers. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate two main issues in the Kuwaiti labor market: job segregation and wage gaps based on gender (male vs female) and citizenship (Kuwaiti vs non-Kuwaiti). The first essay will provide a historical framework for the way that Kuwait’s labor force policies has e evolved over time, and assess whether they were successful in integrating Kuwaiti workers into the labor force and across public and private sectors of employment. The second essay will investigate the gender wage gap, which refers to the pay differential between male and female workers for a specific job given equivalent worker qualifications using Oaxaca and Blinder (OB) decomposition model of the Unrestricted Quantile Regression (UQR) analysis. The third essay will examine the wage gap in the Kuwaiti labor market based on workers’ nationality, using the aforementioned model to identify whether the wage gap between Kuwaiti and non-Kuwaiti workers is persistent, how much of the gap is due to discrimination, and whether it is different across the wage distribution.