The Jordanian labor market is experiencing a complex paradox: high unemployment rates alongside ample job opportunities across various sectors. This reveals the phenomenon of disguised and latent unemployment, which permeates the structure of the national economy. Despite the availability of thousands of jobs annually in the industrial, agricultural, construction, service, and tourism sectors, the unemployment rate remains high, reaching 21.3% in the second quarter of 2025. Youth unemployment has reached 46.5% in recent years, one of the highest rates among the age group most capable of working and being productive. This contradiction raises fundamental questions about why large segments of the workforce are reluctant to take advantage of available opportunities, despite the market's actual need for labor.

 

Official data indicates a decline in employment rates from 56.7% in 2017 to approximately 45% in 2023, a drop reflecting a structural imbalance between the size of the labor force and the actual number of employed individuals. Despite this decline, the Jordanian economy created over 95,000 new job opportunities in 2023 alone, a significant increase compared to 2022. However, these opportunities are largely concentrated in the capital and urban areas, while demand remains limited in governorates with the highest unemployment rates, such as Ma'an, where unemployment reached 33.9%. This spatial imbalance in the distribution of opportunities exacerbates disguised unemployment, as a large segment of the workforce remains unable to access the available opportunities.

 

Furthermore, approximately 60% of the unemployed hold a high school diploma or higher, and 86.5% of applicants to the Civil Service Bureau are university graduates. This reveals a clear cultural preference for office work and government jobs, contrasted with a marked reluctance towards vocational and field-based work. This trend exacerbates the gap between supply and demand, leading to a surplus of applicants in certain sectors and a severe shortage in others that require both skilled and unskilled labor. While the construction sector experiences a significant oversupply, the agricultural and fishing sectors suffer from labor shortages, and the industrial, renewable energy, and logistics sectors require workers who are not readily available locally.

 

Disguised unemployment is also evident in the growing informal workforce, which has reached approximately 1.2 million workers from 24 nationalities. This large number indicates that a significant portion of the local workforce is outside the formal labor market, either due to unsuitable conditions, a lack of incentives, inadequate training, or high expectations among young people regarding job nature and wages. Conversely, the private sector remains the largest employer, accounting for 61.4% of total employment. However, it suffers from weak local participation, particularly among women, whose unemployment rate reached 32.8% in 2025. Despite a rise in the female labor force participation rate to 14.6%, three-quarters of working women hold a bachelor's degree or higher, indicating a continued low level of female interest in field and professional jobs.

 

Labor market indicators also show that expatriate workers constitute 44.5% of the workforce in some sectors, although this percentage is slightly lower than the previous year. This further demonstrates the significant gap between available job opportunities and the local workforce willing to fill them. In the service sector specifically, expatriates make up the largest percentage of employees, while Jordanian workers are concentrated in government, administrative, educational, and healthcare positions. These sectors are unable to absorb the annual influx of graduates, especially given the more than 486,000 job applications already pending at the Civil Service Bureau. This reality makes disguised unemployment a complex problem, not related to a lack of opportunities, but rather to a mismatch between skills and expectations and the actual needs of the market. Traditional academic education continues to produce graduates in numbers exceeding the market's capacity to absorb them, while enrollment in vocational and technical education remains limited, despite the market's pressing need for it. Demographic studies confirm that Jordan is heading towards achieving a "demographic opportunity" by 2030, with declining dependency rates and a rising percentage of young people of working age. This makes addressing disguised unemployment essential before the gap widens further.

 

The danger of disguised unemployment lies in the fact that it conceals a significant portion of untapped productive capacity, limits the economy's growth potential, increases pressure on the public sector, and encourages migrant workers to maintain their dominance in large sectors. Addressing this phenomenon requires restructuring the employment, training, and education systems, changing societal attitudes towards vocational work, improving working conditions in the private sector, stimulating investment in the governorates, and linking educational outcomes to market needs through clear, data-driven policies.

 

Disguised unemployment in Jordan is not just a number in an economic report, but rather an indicator of a gap between reality and ambition, and of the need to redirect educational and employment policies towards investing in available human energies, and transforming them from an idle force into a productive force that contributes to building a more inclusive, flexible and capable economy for growth.