Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

European CommissionOccasional Paper 60, Volume Ieducation and vocational training systems, the increased labour participation of women – correspondwith those needed to foster private sector job creation and labour productivity growth at home.A field where analysis is sorely lacking is that of migration policies in countries of origin. TheILO/IOM/OCE 2007 Handbook provides a general framework for policy-making (pp. 37-39) andlabour policy options to improve labour migration outcomes are discussed in Chapter 4 of the WorldBank report (2009a, pp. 69-93).4.2 Outward Migration Flows: Extent and CharacteristicsThe lack of reliable and updated data on outward migration flows means that it is very difficult to draw ageneral picture of this phenomenon in AMCs. Some countries, like Syria, do not provide statistics foroutward migration, and AMC migration to the Gulf States (mostly temporary) is largely unrecorded. Sodata are fragmentary, and it is impossible to construct a comprehensive, accurate and reliable tableshowing the size of AMC outward labour migration, their destination, educational profile….We areforced to work with data from different, inconsistent sources, often corresponding to different years foreach country, or with fragmentary data from destination countries. As noted in the Thematic BackgroundPaper (Marchetta 2009), “most widely-quoted figures on emigrants are immigration-based, i.e. obtainedthrough the aggregation of data gathered in the destination countries. Such an approach can give rise tosubstantial discrepancies with emigration-based statistics, which – in the case of Egypt - can even be246% higher than data gathered in the countries of destination (Fargues, 2007)”. Available figures(summarized in Table 4.2.1) should be considered as minimum estimates, while actual levels could besignificantly higher.In any case, labour migration has played an important role, both economically and socially, in allAMCs in the last three to four decades, with Morocco and Egypt (with close to three million each)amongst the top 20 countries in the world with the largest number of emigrants. According to WorldBank 2009a figures, on average in 2005 the Middle East and North Africa countries had 3.9% of theirtotal population as migrants abroad (a higher proportion than the 2.9% world average). As a percentageof the total population, apart from Lebanon (where emigrants make up 17% of their country’spopulation), migrants from the Maghreb amount to 5.5% of the total population, and movepredominantly towards European OECD countries, while migrants from the Mashreq are estimated at3.3% of the population, and approximately two thirds of them reside in the Gulf and other Arabcountries. Overall, roughly 56% of MENA migrants live in EU countries, 32% in Gulf and other Arabcountries and a mere 12% in other countries, mainly North America and Australia 13 . In Europe, aroundfour-fifths of MENA immigrants come from the Maghreb countries, compared with less than 10% in thecase of Australia and North America, where MENA immigrants come mainly from Mashreq countries.Cross-country differences in terms of the geographical distribution of migrants are also related tothe predominant pattern of migration: while migrants towards the Gulf Countries tend to move on atemporary basis, migration towards the OECD is mostly on a permanent basis (World Bank, 2008a).These differences in geographical distribution and in the prevailing length of the individual migrationexperience have far-reaching consequences on the impact of migration on the labour markets,Characteristics of the labour markets at destination are a relevant mediating factor in shaping theimpact of migration upon the countries of origin. This also entails that the empirical relevance of thevarious potential channels of impact which will be highlighted in the following Chapter are likely todiffer across the Maghreb-Mashreq divide. Another relevant feature is the fact that migrants fromAMCs are predominantly male, although migration flows from Maghreb countries have recorded anincreasingly important role for women and children (Schramm, 2006b).13 In World Bank 2009, pp. 13-26, the shares stated are 42% in the EU, 45% in the Gulf and other Arab Countries and 13% in North America and Australia. This is due to the inclusion ofthe Palestinian diaspora, most of which lives in other Arab countries.58