Publications

This work asks whether the unemployment rate in Algeria should be calculated to also include young people who say they want to work but have not recently searched for a job, especially regarding labour market policies that are meant to appease a young population. To this end, two separate approaches suggested by Kingdon and Knight (2006) are followed. Firstly, the propensity to actively look for work among young men claiming to be ready to work is documented as decreasing financial wealth. This points towards these non-searchers being voluntarily out of employment. In a second step, it is found that they display the same pattern of below average subjective life satisfaction as those searching unemployed across a number of different measures. Thus, the two tests do not point in the same direction. However, with regard to designing active labour market measures, it would seem sensible to consider the discussed group of young men, since the frustration associated with the lack of professional possibilities seems to extend to many who are not actively looking for work. For young women, both analyses fail to yield conclusive results.

Despite substantial investment in women’s education in the MENA region and a significant increase in their educational attainment, women’s labour force participation remains very low. In 2017, Women’s Labour Force Participation (LFP) was averaging 21% in the MENA region, well below the OECD average of 51%. In 2015, the rate of Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) of women in MENA was equally low, compared to other regions average. Besides the underutilisation of skills acquired by educated women, low participation rates have additional consequences for individual women and their families, including a lack of financial autonomy and a degrading social status. After reviewing the constraints impeding women to fully participate in the labour market and to develop entrepreneurial activities, we put forward an action plan to raise female LFP and entrepreneurship in this region, in order to develop this missing pillar of inclusive and sustainable economic development in the MENA region.

This action plan must: 1) end all forms of economic gender discrimination by enacting legislative and administrative reforms to ensure women’s equal rights to economic and productive resources; 2) adopt targeted actions to enhance female labour force participation, and 3) to further promote women entrepreneurship in the region via designing new financing mechanisms tailored for women.

The Euro-Mediterranean Network for Economic Studies (EMNES) 2017-2018 Newsletter presents the new publications of the Network, as well as the organised events and the participations of EMNES members to major academic events.