Abstract
This paper makes use of a sample of 30,043 mostly unemployed Emiratis and a subsample of 376 employed Emiratis drawn from the Tanmia database to estimate the expected returns to education and experience in the UAE. Overall, we find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between expected wages and education and between expected wages and experience for both males and females, suggesting that the wage expectations of unemployed male and female Emiratis may be too unrealistic and thus could explain the challenges faced in finding suitable employment. It would appear from this study that UAE policymakers face serious challenges in ridding their economy of its reliance on skilled foreign expatriates without playing an active role in linking wages to education and productivity in the public sector.
©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
