Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

Chapter IIIEU Migration Policy towards Arab Mediterranean Countries and its Impact on their Labour Marketsthe result of a mismatch between labour supply and national labour demand, which affects alleducational levels above the middle school and which also touches technical education and postsecondary education and university education. It is important to stress that high unemploymentamong university students is frequently explained by the lack of integration between the direct needof the labour market and the general increase in human capital. The higher unemployment rateamong the highly educated is common to all AMCs (see summary Table 3.3.1 of the Final Reportof the Study) and in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria is a very recent phenomenon. Not all theeducated unemployed are ready to emigrate, and not all those women who are unemployed areready for a big move: many of them, as in Egypt, are in search of a job in the public sector, while,instead, in Lebanon the wage premium abroad pushes both men and women, both unemployed andemployed towards migration.In Europe, there is already an excess demand for skilled labour that is not satisfied by the domesticsupply and satisfied only partially by the labour supply coming from Eastern European countries.In the not so near future labour supply from the new accession countries will not be available formigration anymore, and, as could have been predicted before the recent recession, there will beopen demand for high and medium-skilled migrant labour. The Arab Mediterranean countries canthereby be the appropriate pool for recruiting foreign-skilled labour because there is an explicitlabour supply and, at the moment, a lack of adequate demand for educated workers.If the quantity demanded seems to match the quantity supplied, the second problem is the questionof whether the quality of the human capital produced in AMCs is the type of quality needed inEurope. A wide-spread complaint in AMCs is that the increase in education has been obtainedthrough a reduction in the quality of the educated, which could also explain high unemploymentthere. 170But one of the weaknesses of the educational systems in the MENA region is the type ofspecialization among the highly-skilled which is overly concentrated in the humanities and socialsciences (76.2% of the university students are in the humanities and social sciences in Egypt, 75%in Morocco, 60% in Lebanon, 57.4% in Syria, 56% in Algeria, 50% in Tunisia) 171 with too littleattention devoted to vocational training. According to G. Corm (2009) 172 in the MENA region thetotal share of student who went through vocational training in 1999 was only 20%, while, forinstance, in Turkey the corresponding number was 47%. This is an important point to recall inmatching supply on one side of the Mediterranean and demand on the other.Table 2 presents an accurate analysis of likely demand by profession as it could arise in eachEuropean country and the modeling of the CEDEFOP research also specifies the demand by sectorand skill level. If it is difficult to make forecasts because of the present economic crisis and thenear impossibility of measuring its course, it is possible to say that, if in the short run total demanddeclines and the economy settles on a less-skilled growth path, this effect will be temporary, andthe CEDEFOP forecast will only be postponed for, at most, two years. These remain then importantpointers for future tendencies.Given demand on the one side and supply on the other the policy approach will not be to trainworkers for emigration, applying the Filipino model, but to use some trained workers in the origincountries for (temporary or more permanent) positions in the European labour market. The excesssupply of skills (unemployment) is very large thus brain drain is not typically a danger.The economic moment seems also propitious for Europe to attract skilled migrants. After all, NorthAmerican labour markets, in particular the US’s, are seeing workers laid off at all levels, and opendemand for skilled migrant has already declined there. Then too, the economies of the Gulfcountries – while not all seeing the same rapid fall off in production – is postponing investmentsand reducing growth plans and therefore reducing open demand for foreign labour. European states170 National background paper Egypt, J.Wahba, 2009.171 World Bank 2009, “Shaping the Future”, p.44.172 See “Labor Migration in the Middle East and North Africa, A View from the Region”, back ground report for the WB Report “Shaping the Future” p.29.179