Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume IA powerful channel of the transfer of cultural norms which can influence the choice ofentrepreneurial models is represented by migrant associations, whose role in Syria, Morocco andLebanon is discussed by respectively Dumont (2008), de Haas (2007) and Labaki (2006). TheLebanese government supports two public programs (TOKTEN, Transfer Of Knowledge ThroughExpatriate Nationals, and IDAL, Investment Development Authority of Lebanon) to favor thetransfer of social remittances to migrant destination countries.According to Khelfanoui (2006), the contribution of the North American Diaspora to thedevelopment of Algeria in terms of technological transfer is much more important than thefinancial one. There are a number of initiatives, both in the cultural sector and in the scientificsector with the aim of creating a partnership between intellectuals living abroad and those whoremained in the origin country. ALASCO is an association for scientific cooperation that was bornwith this specific goal to arrange periodical visits of Algerian scientists working in US to meetAlgerian colleagues. Moreover, partnerships have been created by the Government with the USEmbassy, and with a University in Quebec, while in the fields of Information Technology, HumanResources and hydrocarbons have already produced cases of beneficial cooperation.The Tunisian Government also shows an interest in the development of contacts with its brainsabroad in order to expand the beneficial effects of skilled migration for the country: scientificconferences to establish relationships between the competences abroad and Tunisian Universitieshave been organized, and a Coordination Unit has been established in order to create a nationalstrategy to use the knowledge of emigrants (Zekri, 2009).10. ConclusionsMigration produces deep and far-reaching effects on the labour markets of Arab MediterraneanCountries, through an array of different - but closely intertwined - channels, which have been analyzedin this paper both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The complexity of the effectsinduced by migration, and the limited empirical evidence which has so far been gathered with respectto AMCs, entails that putting together the pieces of the puzzle that have been separately described inthe previous section is a challenging task, which should not be expected to provide a neat andconsistent picture. Some knowledge gaps – notably on the impact of migration on the level and thedistribution of labour earnings – remain, and no conclusions can be drawn about them, but this paperhas contributed to filling other gaps, collecting relevant arguments which have been put forward indifferent scientific disciplines.There is no doubt that migration reduces the pressure on the labour market, thanks to demographicfactors, and this is particularly true in small-sized AMCs. Moreover, migration can also exert aninfluence on these factors themselves, through the transfer of cultural norms from the countries ofdestination which reshape fertility decisions (Fargues, 2007b). This indirect – and admittedlymedium-term – indirect effect can either strengthen or dampen the initial direct effect, depending onthe cultural values that prevails in destination countries. This means that the countries of the Mashreqstand to benefit less than the countries of the Maghreb, whose migrants move predominantly towardsthe low-fertility European countries, and indeed – as the case of Morocco shows – theunemployment-reducing effect of migration can also induce a substantial internal mobility towardsmigrant-sending areas.The influence of migration is uneven across skill groups, as the data – which also include non-OECD destinations – consistently show that the emigration rates from AMCs are higher for highlyeducated individuals. A review of, regrettably indirect, elements suggest that the prospect tomigrate is unlikely to induce substantial increases in the private investments in education in AMCs– with the exception of Lebanon, Jordan and, to a lesser extent, Egypt – that would aggravate theproblem of graduate unemployment. This suggests that the brain drain should not rank high among146