Researching the Quality of Employment in the Middle East

Ten years after the protests of the Arab Spring, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and crisis may exacerbate problems of social cohesion in the MENA region, especially if employment opportunities are more limited because of the crisis. However, wellbeing and economic sustainability depend not only on the quantity but also on the quality of available jobs.

In the MENA region, countries with very diverse levels of development will require different sets of policies. However, they all share a common problem in that they often lack suitable data sources and indicators for dealing with the combined objective of achieving both full employment and generating good quality jobs. For example, our recent study of Egypt, shows that high economic growth rates generated a significant increase in the quantity of jobs. However, due to labour reforms that had deregulated the labour market in prior years, the quality of employment deteriorated significantly over the same period.

This project seeks to identify potential informational gaps in the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia and to develop a multidimensional index of the quality of employment to examine how the quality of employment has developed in the MENA region in recent years and to illustrate how policymakers can target resources and policies to the most vulnerable workers. By building on existing studies from Latin America, Europe and the Egypt, the project aims to focus attention on the issue of job quality and prepare for future labour market developments and corresponding skill requirements.

This project forms part of the Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme, funded by the Emirates Foundation.