Such challenges have all been the preoccupation of your majesty, and you have been constantly urging the authorities concerned to overcome them. The most prominent of those challenges are the following: First: employment of the Saudi youth, which constitutes one of the major challenges facing the national economy. In spite of the good achievements made in the preceding period, estimates indicate that unemployment among Saudis amounted to about 9.6 percent in 2009. Given the rate of population growth and structure, it is important to continue intensifying current efforts to increase investment to develop the human capital with the active participation of the private and public sectors. Efforts should be intensified for Saudizing the jobs in the private sector, and obstacles hindering this process should be considered and eliminated. The percentage of Saudization fit for the nature of each activity and sector needs to be determined, and work should be made to activate the procedures and regulations that respect productivity and safeguard the rights of workers and employers alike. Second: good utilization of economic resources of our country, most notably oil and gas that represent the most important elements of the economic development of the Kingdom. Figures indicate that the rates of domestic consumption of the Kingdom’s oil and gas are growing at high rates, recording an average growth of 5.9 percent during the past five years. This is a high growth rate compared to the population growth and the size of GDP, which calls for investigating the reasons for such an increase and rationalizing it.
In the area of monetary and banking policies, SAMA followed monetary policy aimed at achieving stability in the financial sector and providing the necessary liquidity to meet domestic demand for credit, by taking a package of proactive measures to enhance the liquidity position and reduce the cost of lending in order to ensure that banks continue their financing role in the development process in the Kingdom. The most prominent measures were: reducing the Statutory Reserve requirements ratio, the Repo and the Reverse Repo Rates several times, enhancing the liquidity position in the banking system by placing long term deposits in local currency and US Dollar with local banks on behalf of government institutions and organizations, reducing the pricing of treasury bills, facilitating foreign exchange swaps in order to provide the necessary liquidity in US Dollar for the local banking system. As for fiscal policy, the government continued the expansion in public expenditure and increasing the pumping of funds to specialized lending institutions by an estimated amount of Rls 40 billion during 2009. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, In spite of the adverse impacts of the successive financial crises, they clearly resulted in combining international efforts to review the global financial system and commence taking reforming measures to perform its role effectively and positively in the global economic activity and international external trade.