Individuals with low education in Egypt, are subject to one job career which gives them very little opportunity for improving life standards. This was one of the findings of the paper Structural labor market transitions and wage dispersion in Egypt by Shaimaa Yassine, discussed at the session on Labor market dynamics at the ERF's 18th Annual Conference.
For Insan Tunali, University of Minnesota and ERF, who chaired the session, the paper indicates that arrival rates of offers for workers inEgypt are generally higher when unemployed than when employed.
He added that the paper studies labor market differentials across the different educational groups in Egypt showing that the wide variation in frictional transition parameters across these groups help in explaining persistent unemployment and wage differentials especially among the very high educated.
The second paper discussed in the session Labor mobility between the formal/informal divide inTurkey: evidence from individual level data, by Aysit Tansel and Elif Oznur Acar, implements the mobility analysis to Turkish Labor markets with a specific emphasis on informality. He added that persistence in the area where one starts from is the pattern in Turkey.
http://youtu.be/YIz93qS9Clo
Tunali added that the study takes a labor mobility analysis in the context of formal/informal division in Turkey. One of the interesting findings was that Turkish women do not have much of a chance to move out of informal sectors if they start out there.
