One in 10 people in the UAE say they have lost their job in the past six months, according to a new poll.

The survey, carried out by research organisation YouGov for The National newspaper, found that almost two thirds of the 821 questioned said close friends or members of their family had lost their job.

Despite this, 58 percent of the unemployed said they were planning to stay on in the UAE to look for another job.

A third however said they planned to leave - 20 percent heading back to their home country, six per cent looking for work in another GCC country and seven per cent hoping to relocate elsewhere abroad.

Not surprisingly, hardest-hit have been the construction and property sectors where 44 percent and 41 percent of those asked knew someone who had lost their job.

Meanwhile, more than two thirds (68 per cent) of those still in work said they were very nervous about their job security, a proportion that fell to 42 per cent among Emiratis.

Almost 90 per cent of those surveyed said they felt there was a lack of transparency in the UAE about the current financial situation, a concern felt most widely among westerners (97 per cent).

The results come less than a week after Bahrain’s Minister for Labour told Arabian Business in an interview that a residency cap for expats, limiting unskilled workers to a maximum five-year stay in any one Gulf state, could be implemented as early as next year.

''I hope that we will push [the residency cap] in 2010, when we have the GCC summit here [in Bahrain],'' said Dr Al Alawi.

''It should be ratified then, and implemented straight away. That is my hope, and I have been trying [to achieve this] since 2002,'' he added.