Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

Chapter IFinal Reporttrue Euro-Mediterranean Employment and Migration Strategy finally able to address the issue ofemployment and labour migration at the regional level.7. Proposals for Action and Policy Recommendations7.1. Data and Research Gaps on Labour Markets and Migration in AMCsAs the literature review produced for this Study has shown (Marchetta 2009), there is a shortage ofresearch on labour and migration in AMCs, and even more so on the interaction between both. Evidencefrom the literature comes mainly from other regions, and even this is very scarce in some respects, forinstance the impact of migration on labour markets of countries of origin. So a first step in facing thehuge challenges of employment in AMCs and in addressing the complex issue of migration in the regionis to know more about both its magnitude and characteristics. This Study makes a contribution in thisdirection by collecting best available national data according to a common template and systematizingthe existent literature on the impact of migration on labour market, providing a possible analyticalframework that could guide future research on this topicIndeed, despite recent improvements in the availability and the quality of employment and migrationstatistics for AMCs any serious analysis of labour markets and migration in Arab MediterraneanCountries is seriously hampered by the unavailability of data across the region, the unreliability andinconsistency of available data and the difficulty of comparing country to country. Discrepanciesbetween data gathered by countries of destination (in particular OECD countries, since Gulf and otherArab countries are notorious for the shortcomings of their immigration statistics) and those produced bycountries of origin are enormous (see Table 3 in Fargues 2009, p. 479), and not only due to irregularmigration. One particular shortcoming of existing data is the unavailability of statistics broken down byregions or lower administrative units within a country, which would allow for a much more sophisticatedcross-sectional analysis, for instance, on the impact of remittances on labour market performance(wages, labour participation, unemployment rates…).In terms of issues, some obvious research gaps are related to the behaviour of the informal sector andhow it interrelates with the formal labour market and international migration (informal employment is atrue black hole of knowledge for labour markets in the region), the interaction between rural-urbaninternal migration and international migration (urban labour markets, often informal, tend to play animportant role in this sequence) and the extent and behaviour of inter-Arab migration (an important partof it still unregistered). Finally, a more thorough analysis of education systems and skills acquisition,carried out too at the micro-level (through surveys on school to work itineraries and on the differenttracks taken by those who ended up migrating) would offer important insights into the shortcomings ofthe educational system.7.2. A Research Agenda for Labour Markets and Migration in AMCsGiven the difficulties of compiling basic information on labour markets and migration in AMCs for theNational Background Papers and the lack of specific research focused on evidence from the region, theresearch agenda on labour markets and migration in AMCs should take a multilevel approach. Thismight include, in this sequence:- A region-wide program to produce a complete set of standardised statistics on labour markets andmigration based on national statistical sources (and, when applicable, international statistical data,such as the OECD migration database) using the same methodologies throughout the region forreasons of comparability. This would allow researchers to fill in the current gaps on the number of97