Introduction: This Fast Brief provides a general background on the main features of labor regulations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. This is part of an effort to understand employability constraints in MENA and to this end a World Bank team gathered information on labor legislation and other legal acts concerning labor regulations in the region. All this rendered more urgent with the ongoing social and political turmoil in the region. Within the broader scope of labor regulations, and in order to assure regional comparability, the information that was collected focused on key issues associated with commencing or terminating employment and during the period of employment (including maternity benefits). The main sources of the data are the World Bank's Doing Business 2010 2 and the International Labor Organization (ILO) databank 3. This Brief is to provide policymakers and international organizations with a regional analysis of how labor regulation affects labor market outcomes in the region and to inform governments on strategic approaches to employment creation through labor policy and associated reforms. This activity comes as a response to regional priorities in the context of the Arab World Initiative (AWI): one of the six strategic themes of the AWI focuses explicitly on employment creation as a top priority.
Using 19 years of cross-section wage data, we look at the trend of the ratio of male to female wages in Colombia. First, we observe a long-term trend towards an increase in the gender wage gap that may be related to new labor regulations giving more protection to women and thereby raising the cost of female employment for firms. Second, we measure the impact on poverty of the increasing gap by producing estimates of the income distribution for the subsequent years had the wage gap remained at the low level it used to be in the early 1990s. As mainly low-skilled women suffered from the increase in the wage gap, we find that the phenomenon contributed to an overall increase in poverty during the decade. Copyright 2006 The Authors; Journal compilation 2006 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
This note assesses the main micro-determinants of informal employment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from a human development stand point. It's main purpose is to quantify the patterns of labor informality (defined as the share of all employment with no access to social security) according to age, gender, education level, employment sector, profession, marital status, employment status, and geographic area in a selected group of countries in the region. Results indicate that the size of the public sector and the size of the agriculture sector are perhaps the main correlates of informality in the region. Countries where agricultural employment still constitutes a large share of overall employment (such as Morocco and Yemen) are associated with higher levels of overall informality. On the contrary, countries with larger public sectors and more urbanized such as Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, display lower levels of overall informality. The existence of a large public sector, still associated with generous benefits and better employment quality, creates an important segmentation between public and private employment in many MENA countries. Informality rates are very high among youth between ages fifteen and twenty-four. After age twenty-four, informality decreases rapidly until individuals reach prime working age (forty to forty-five years). This rapid decrease in informality rates goes hand in hand with a rapid increase in public sector employment, suggesting that informal workers enter into public sector jobs as they move from youth into adulthood. Results also indicate that the average worker in the informal sector is disadvantaged versus the average worker in the formal sector, as they are uncovered against social risks and are generally employed in low-productivity/low pay jobs.
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