Employment Experience in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the employment experience in the Middle East and North Africa in the past two decades. The oil boom of the 1970s and the resulting international migration permitted an expansion in public sector employment and a redistribution of the labor force from countries with large populations to the region's oil-exporting countries. By the late 1980s, the region had to face its fundamental employment challenges: rapid population growth, excessive public sector employment, and risky and sizeable exposure to external shocks. Unemployment increased since the mid 1980s and is currently in the double-digit figures for most countries in the region. Real wages declined substantially, and in some cases lost all of their earlier gains since the mid-1970s. To address the employment problem, it is essential to generate sustained economic growth, particularly in the informal sector. Arabic Abstract: