7% of Qatar residents satisfied with salary

AMIDST a global economic slump, salary satisfaction is running low across the Middle East, with just 7% of residents in Qatar “highly satisfied” with their remuneration, according to a recent research conducted jointly by regional job site Bayt.com and researcher YouGov.
And while almost a fifth (19%) of residents in Qatar felt positive about the future, 18% remained quite pessimistic.
Across the Gulf, the picture was similarly bleak with every GCC country registering the same level of dissatisfaction regarding salary.
Qatar had 19% earners raking between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, and 7% earning over $10,000 each month. It was 22% for Bahrain and 20% for UAE ($5,000-10,000).
The lowest paid residents in the region were in the North African countries of Algeria (at 54%) and Egypt and Morocco (47%) earning under $500 a month.
“Conducting a wide-scale survey across the Middle East by asking what level of remuneration an employee receives and their satisfaction with it helps to paint a very clear picture of economic conditions inside a particular country,” Bayt.com regional manager Amer Zureikat said.
The survey also looked at whether average salary increases were in line with the average rise in the cost of living.
In Qatar, respondents said that living costs had increased by 31% while the average salary rise was just 15%, indicating that the average salary increase did not reflect the rise in the cost of living.
The study also said that majority of respondents managed to save between 1 and 5%. A quarter of all respondents said they saved nothing.
The biggest savers were residents in Oman, Qatar and Bahrain, with 33% and 30%, respectively, saving more than 21% of their monthly salary.
“These figures reveal that even though some people receive much higher salaries in some countries than others, it doesn’t correlate that these high earners save more money,” YouGov CEO Nassim Ghrayeb said.
The most highly satisfied workers were found in the oil, gas and petrochemicals sectors. The industries which provided least salary satisfaction to workers were education and academia, government and civil service and transport and travel.
Additionally, the study revealed that across the Middle East, 77% of residents felt they had been hard hit by the global economic crisis, with 28% of people in Qatar stating they have felt no effects; least affected was Oman, with more than a third (37%) stating they have not been hit.
Egypt and the UAE were the gloomiest countries surveyed with 30% and 29% feeling pessimistic about the future, while Oman and Bahrain’s respondents were brightest, with 23% and 22%, respectively. The data includes over 13,881 respondents across the region with inputs from males and females of all nationalities aged over 20 years.

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