Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume Ihas shown that it is the graduates from prestigious and select universities and colleges who benefit mostfrom these schemes: among the university graduates, ¾ of graduates from the medicine, pharmacy, theENSI, the ENIT and the HEC benefit from support for their professional insertion. In contrast, less than¼ of graduates from other science and humanities universities have access to such programmes.Although current ALMP instruments have an overly-limited scope to deal with the core ofunemployment, most of them (SIVP and PC50, to give two examples) have a positive impact on theemployment prospects of beneficiaries. However, the evaluation showed that one of the maininstruments, the Fonds National pour l’Emploi (21-21) has a negative impact, i.e. the chances forbeneficiaries to find a job are less than if they had never taken part (see Mahjoub 2009, pp. 28-34).Also in Morocco ALMPs have been focused on graduate workers and have suffered fromdispersion and lack of coordination between the different public labour markets operators. In Algeria,barely 12% of jobs created through ALMPs between 1998 and 2002 became permanent jobs, pointingto another weakness in these programmes.These results show that, while ALMPs are a necessary ingredient of a comprehensive nationalemployment policy, they can only be effective in the framework of a larger integrated economic policypromoting employment.3.2 Recent Changes in Labour Market Legislation and Reform ProjectsIn contrast to the lack of labour market regulation reforms in AMCs in the last few years (see Section2.2), recent developments as regards national employment policies in several AMCs allow for somehope and lend themselves to further cooperation in this field with the European Union.In Algeria, a national employment strategy worthy of this name was only adopted in July 2008. The‘Action Plan to Promote Employment and Fighting Unemployment’ defines for the first time acoherent policy framework to promote job creating investment and to pursue active labour marketpolicies. Its objectives are as follows: (i) supporting job creating investment; (ii) promoting vocationaland technical training; (iii) a multidimensional policy to encourage companies to create employment;(iv) modernizing the labour market management by strengthening labour market institutions,particularly the National Employment Agency; (v) promoting youth employment through a newscheme to support professional insertion; and (vi) follow-up and evaluation mechanisms for the ActionPlan by national structures.In Jordan, the Government National Employment Strategy was put together in 2008 by the Ministryof Labour with assistance from the International Labour Organization. According to the NationalEmployment Strategy document, previous Jordanian employment policies and programmes werelacking for two reasons. First, they were fragmented and were not comprehensive enough toeffectively address labour market dynamics and challenges. For example, employment creationpolicies were formulated separately from tax policies; now there is a commitment to the objective of‘joining up’ employment policy formulation with other aspects of policymaking related to humancapital and the economy. These include macro-economic, tax and education policies. Second, previousemployment programs were not formulated with full stakeholder participation at all levels. Theseshortcomings are common to many other AMCs, and extend not only to employment policies, but tax,macroeconomic and trade policies as well.There are other changes recently introduced in Jordan’s labour regulation. In 2008, the Labour Lawwas expanded to include the previously excluded domestic work and agricultural sectors. Special legalregulations for workers in these two sectors are being formulated. These regulations will setparameters for workers’ employment contracts, working hours and for the inspection of theirworkplaces. It is worth noting that the majority of the estimated 300,000 migrant workers in Jordan areeither domestic or agricultural workers. On the other hand, the MoL, in partnership with the ILO, aims54