Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume I(the National Background Paper for this country highlights data inconsistencies over time and acrossinstitutions). All this means that any researcher interested in labour markets or migration in the regionmust complete a veritable obstacle race. Population and employment data are disseminated followingcensuses and surveys, and often present serious shortcomings if not inconsistencies; besides that, huge,unexplained variations have been observed in published data, sometimes from year to year. Internationalorganizations most often take up data coming from national statistical sources without questioning theirvalidity or enquiring how the data was elaborated, incorporating the shortcomings of national data butblurring their origin. In turn, very often data published by international organizations are not establishedas a result of actual data collection but rather are self-generated by econometric models. The researcherbecomes an investigator.As the notes on data sources on labour markets and migrations prepared for this Study and includedas Annexes to the National Background Papers have shown, this is a shared problem throughout theregion, and on a scale unknown in other regions. A recent report on Training and Employment in theNorthern and Southern Mediterranean Region (Medstat 2008) published in the framework of theMedstat regional statistical cooperation programme has not gone beyond compiling existing statisticalsources, without a real added value. So the first major challenge any research on labour markets andmigration in the AMCs has to face is the scarcity and unreliability of data sources. Most analysis onthe region is made on the basis of guesstimates drawn from fragmentary and often incoherent datasources or from empirical evidence from other regions transposed to the region through econometricestimations; the inappropriateness of those methods is revealed when one submits the results todetailed analysis. Statistical work with current data, let alone quantitative economic analysis, is hardlypossible. Even the construction of simple comparative tables for the region is often incompatible withmethodological rigour (as shown in the tables of this report, which reflect inconsistencies in theNational Background Papers, in turn taken from most reliable national statistical sources available 3 ).Comparability and consistency is hampered by the discontinuity of sources, the delay in theavailability of data (sometimes the most recent data available are several years old, as shown, forinstance, in Tables 4.2.1 and 5.2.1), and the implicit assumptions or calculation methods. So, as withany other data on labour markets and migration flows in the region, all the data and tables provided inthis report, extracted from National Background Papers, should be used with caution and doublechecked.However, the order of magnitude they convey gives an accurate insight into the processesand challenges examined here.The StudyDespite marked national variations, the ten background papers which are synthesized here show thatthere are common elements and trends in all AMCs, and that all of them, from Morocco to Syria, shareroughly the same challenges (though, of course, with differences in magnitude and emphasis): they arenet exporters of labour, have a large number of unemployed citizens, in particular among the youngand among women, underperforming education systems, oversized State sectors and a very largeinformal sector. This justifies the AMC grouping selected for the Study, instead of other groupingsmore commonly used by international organisations for convenience (in particular, the Middle Eastand North Africa or the MENA countries grouping, which also includes Iraq and Iran and the GulfCountries). It also opens up a wide area of opportunity for regional cooperation on these issues,particularly as all eight AMCs under study belong to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.In the final chapter of the Study, this analysis is used as a basis for developing concrete policyrecommendations both for the EU and for AMCs, but also for EU-AMC economic co-operation. Theanalysis and the recommendations here aim to be relevant for EU migration policy-making, but also3 An example: data for the number of unemployed for Syria can vary between 454,000 and 1,444,074 depending on whether official figures or “corrected figures” are used to account forthe larger than registered labour force. Discrepancies between figures in Tables 1.2.1 and 2.4.1 are explained by such data inconsistencies .26