Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume IMENA region would have been higher in a hypothetical scenario without emigration, butunemployment rates remain high, and this has greatly softened the potential positive impact ofmigration on domestic wages. This suggests that the opportunity cost of the migration of universitygraduates is low; the majority of skilled migrants who decided to migrate were unemployed oremployed in the public sector. This also means that skilled migration does not create a brain draineffect and, probably, that it reduces the public wage bill (World Bank, 2008a). Table 6.1 suggeststhat Egypt has the highest selection rate among AMCs, and this can be traced back to the highunemployment rate among educated working age individuals. A comparison between Egypt andMorocco shows that there is a positive relationship between education level and the chances ofbeing unemployed in Egypt, while a similar relationship does not exist in Morocco (World Bank,2008a). Still, Boudarbat (2004) shows that the unemployment rate of Moroccan universitygraduates was, in 2000, about four times the rate of individuals with less than six years ofschooling. Indeed, Sorenson (2004) reports that the Moroccan government depicted migration as asolution to the problem of widespread underemployment and unemployment of the domesticworkforce in official documents.Other features of the migration process can produce more substantial impacts on the labour force,namely its uneven gender profile and the migration of workers out of specific sectors. As far asgender is concerned, migration can lead to a worsening wage gap – and a worsening too of otherlabour market outcomes, such as participation and unemployment rates – across genders, 89although such an effect – which is due to the uneven impact of migration on the endowments ofmale and female labour 90 – can be counteracted by the effects that migration exerts on the behavioron the labor market, possibly reducing female participation (see Section 7.1).Does migration create relevant shortages of workers in some sectors in AMCs? World Bank(2008a) argues that migration does not create bottlenecks in the domestic market of Middle Easternand North African countries. Nevertheless, such a general statement should not lead us to overlookspecific instances of possible shortages. Doquier and Rapoport (2009) report data on researchersemployed in the science and technology sector in the United States: the number of Tunisiansworking there is 0.17 times the number of researchers working in Tunisia, and the correspondingfigure for Algeria is 0.25 times. Khelfaoui (2006), finds that engineers and scientists are the mostcommon professional category of Algerians in the United States, though they may not be employedaccording to their qualifications.It is also worthwhile paying a closer look at what happens to health workers. Docquier andBhargawa (2007) collect data from 16 receiving OECD countries, and they define the totalphysician emigration rate of a country as the ratio between the stock of national physicians workingabroad and the number of physicians trained in the home country, thus excluding those trained inthe host country. The figures we present here represent an update of Docquier and Bhargawa(2007) presented by Doquier and Rapoport (2009), where the authors have added South Africa tothe destination countries.We observe in Table 6.3 that the percentage of physicians abroad – as far as a selected group ofOECD countries is concerned – is very high only for Lebanon and Syria. Estimates from the Arab-American Medical Association show that there are 15,000 Arab physicians in the United States,and 6,000 of them come from Syria (Kawakibi, 2009). Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind thedata limitations, as Achouri and Achour (2002), for example, point out that most Tunisianphysicians who migrate go to Saudi Arabia.89 UNDP (2006) observes that “in Jordan, for example, women university graduates earn 71 per cent of the amount earnedby males in the same cohort; this drops to 50 per cent among those who have completed basic education only, while illiteratewomen earn less than 33 per cent of male wages (Moghadam, 2005)”.90 The existing gender gap in migration flows out of AMCs could be off set by the steady growth in demand for jobs, such ashousework and the care of the elderly, which are usually taken by women in European countries (Al Ali, 2004).130