Reabsorption of Returning Workers from the Gulf: The Asian Experience * (EMPLOYMENT Issues) (Report‪)‬

The paper addresses the problems of the reintegration of return migrants in the context of major South Asian and South East Asian labour exporting countries to the Middle East. The discussion that follows briefly analyses the changing trends in outmigration, the socioeconomic characteristics of return migrants to the region--their skills, occupations, job preferences, region of residence, as well as the macro-level employment situation in the concerned countries. Further the study investigates to what extent the return migration is associated with skill acquisition or upgrading of skills and the pattern of utilisation by the returnees of the accumulated savings including both remittance income and the amount they bring back. The discussion is largely based on evidence provided in surveys of return migrants mostly undertaken in the mid eighties when due to the collapse of oil prices and the subsequent cuts in the development programme of the Middle Eastern economies nearly all the labour exporting countries, to varying degrees, were faced with an influx of return migrants. The analysis also draws on more recent evidence available for a limited number of South Asian countries.