Publications

The analysis of labour supply in South Mediterranean Countries indicates that only a package of long term policies can foster employment creation. The quality of education systems needs to be improved to deliver good employees for companies and, potentially, new entrepreneurs. Social security protection needs to be extended to the private sector to make it more attractive to workers and to reduce informality, whereby it strongly contributes to the endogenous creation of opportunities. Institutional reform at the government level and in the market can significantly support this process. In the medium term, the combination of a growing population and low educational attainment with poor labour opportunities in the region, will only serve as a push factor and foster outflows of migrants.

Using a sustainable migration policy framework that benefits both origins and destinations remains of crucial importance. Lastly, our research also indicates that data availability in the region is a major obstacle to identifying labour market problems and formulating appropriate policy measures but also to monitoring their implementation.

This policy brief reviews the state of legal migration across the Mediterranean: it examines the existing migration links between the South Med countries and the EU, attempts to uncover the obstacles to legal migration and suggests ways to improve migration management. We argue that, if used strategically, even small-scale projects to foster legal migration can contribute to expanding legal migration opportunities and reducing irregular crossings in the longer term. However, this can only occur if projects are implemented in close cooperation with governments of the South Med countries and if they can contribute to capacity building of the national labour market and educational institutions. Further, given the prevalence of the family migration channel between the South Med and the EU, one way to foster legal migration is to leverage existing social networks, i.e. by engaging the South Med diaspora residing in the EU and supporting labour market integration of family migrants.

The objective of this policy brief is to formulate a policy roadmap to untap the potential for employment creation by MSMEs in SEMCs, with a particular focus on Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia – building on the findings of four years of research on MSME development carried out under EMNES. MSMEs have an important role to play in creating much needed employment opportunities, but their development is currently hindered by a number of obstacles related to both the structural features of private sectors that remain underdeveloped in most SEMCs and specific issues, such as lack of access to finance, the high incidence of informality and low integration into global value chains.

The proposed policy road map provides a comprehensive framework to formulate, implement and monitor a fully-fledged MSME policy and to mainstream a ‘Think Small First’ principle in all policy areas relevant to the development of MSMEs. The policy road map is designed to complement the assessments of SME policies within SEMCs conducted by the OECD, EU and ETF (2008; 2014; 2018) and includes a discussion on the role that the EU can play to support its implementation.