A United Arab Emirates (UAE) minister denied Monday that his country has witnessed a mass departure of foreign workers due to the financial crisis. His comments come as expatriate workers worldwide face increasing pressure in a shrinking employment market.

Workers are merely being sent home for holidays, UAE Labour Minister Saqr Gobash said.

He rejected recent bank and consultancy studies predicting that the population in Dubai will shrink by 17 percent in the coming year.

Gobash stated that the ministry issued 662,000 work permits from October to March, while only 405,000 permits have been cancelled.

He said these figures “show an increase … not a decrease” in the number of expatriate workers, who come mainly from South and Southeast Asia and who make up over 85 percent of the total population.

The minister said some companies are sending their employees to their home countries on long vacations, sometimes for six months, as a way of dealing with the slowdown in business that followed the global economic meltdown.

An AFP report yesterday stated that Dubai’s once-booming economy has been hard-hit by the global economic crisis, which tightened the noose on finance available for Dubai businesses, especially the massive real estate sector – once the main engine of growth.

This was followed by layoffs en masse, especially in real estate and construction companies, the report stated.

The departure of expatriate workers has not been an uncommon sight in recent times.

In Singapore, thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia, reported the Washingtong Post last month.

Singapore’s exports collapsed by a 35 percent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia, as the export boom stopped abruptly and may take years to return amid the recession. Economists from Credit Suisse predicted an exodus of 200,000 foreigners, or one in every 15 workers, by the end of 2010.

Last month Polish trade unions demanded restrictions on the number of foreign workers allowed into their country to leave room for thousands of Polish workers returning from Britain and other parts of the European Union affected by the economic crisis.

Unemployment in Poland reached 10.9 percent in February, up from around 9 percent in 2008 but still only about half the level seen as recently as 2004.