Latest statistics on population and employment published by the Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) revealed that as of the end of 2022 the total population of Kuwait reached 4.74 million, marking a growth of 8 percent from a year earlier. In absolute terms this growth equated to an increase of 351,000 people from the 4.39 million in 2021.
While the Kuwaiti population increased by 1.9 percent to reach 1.51 million, adding around 29,000 citizens since 2021, the non-Kuwaiti population increased by 11 percent to reach 3.22 million people. Accordingly, the percentage of Kuwaitis in the total population declined from 33.9 percent in 2021, to 32 percent last year. A gender-wise segregation of the population also shows that the number of Kuwaiti females outnumber males, with 773,000 females to 744,000 males.
On employment and labor market details the data from PACI was quite revealing. The figures showed that the total workforce in Kuwait’s labor market stood at 2.86 million at the end of 2022, representing 60 percent of the overall population. The numbers also revealed that 32 percent of Kuwaitis and 74 percent of non-Kuwaitis in the country were engaged in the labor market.
Despite an increase in the number of Kuwaitis in the workforce by 12,000 to reach a total of 481,000 nationals, the percentage of Kuwaiti workers out of the total number of workers in the country decreased from around 18 percent in 2021 to 16.8 percent by December 2022.
Interestingly, 79 percent of all Kuwaiti workers in the labor market, or around 381,000 nationals, were employed in the public sector, while only 5 percent of citizens opted to work in the private sector. In other words, out of the total 493,000 workers in the government sector, 77.2 percent were Kuwaitis.
On the other hand, by the end of 2022 the number of unemployed Kuwaitis rose to 26,000 or 5.4 percent of the total number of Kuwaiti workers, compared to about 25,400 at the end of 2021. The report also found that only 32 percent of Kuwaitis in the working age group of 15 to 65 years of age were in the labor force, while 35 percent of Kuwaitis over 15 years of age do not participate in the labor market because they were students, full-time house workers, or retirees with income.
