Abstract
In this paper, I describe the employment problems of Middle Eastern youth in terms of a credentialist equilibrium, in which investments in education have mainly served to secure desired public sector jobs. These problems are low productivity of education, high youth unemployment, and long waiting times between graduation and a first job as youth queue for public sector jobs. The outcomes can be directly linked to past (successful) efforts of nationalist governments that promoted modernization and social and economic mobility by linking government jobs to formal schooling. This strategy has been failing in recent decades because of the shrinking ability of the public sector to hire graduates and the rapidly rising population of youth. An important reason for the longevity of the policies that have created these adverse outcomes, and of the authoritarian bargain that has characterized Middle Eastern societies, is that their implementation was relatively meritocratic and free of the type of corruption that pervaded other government operations. In the early stages, access to schools and government jobs were based on performance in school rather than social class. However, evidence shows that even this aspect of the authoritarian bargain has eroded in recent years. Success in schools has increasingly come to depend on parental background and place of birth, thus undermining the legitimacy of the state-led education and employment strategy. I argue that reform of the exiting systems, in particular replacing the role of the public sector as the principal employer of educated youth with the private sector, is fraught with difficulties because populist pressures call for more, not less, state interventions and redistribution.
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Notes
I am grateful to Josh Deutschmann and Bryce Stucki for helpful comments.
Reflecting popular media perceptions, in the preface to their new book, Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) note poverty as the main cause for the uprisings in the Arab world.
The data for Saudi Arabia include migrants. Since the migrant population is likely to have a lower ratio of youth to adults, this graph underestimates the youth to adult ratio for Saudi Arabia.
International Labor Organization (2009) estimates that 29% of the workers in the Arab countries work in the civil service or public enterprises.
The estimates of inequality of opportunity in this table is similar to Table 5, but for some countries, notably Egypt, the estimates are much less precise and different in magnitude. The reason is that whereas the latter estimates are at the mean of the circumstance variables, the results in Table 6 are based on the variation as two extremes, which sometimes do not have many observations.
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Salehi-Isfahani, D. Education, Jobs, and Equity in the Middle East and North Africa. Comp Econ Stud 54, 843–861 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.2012.41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.2012.41