Notes

the pandemic, while many other workers, especially women, dropped out of the labor force altogether (Krah, Phadera, and Wai-Poi 2021). In Morocco, only three months into the pandemic, 34 percent of responding households mentioned that they did not have any sources of income whatsoever, and this share was even higher among the poor (44 percent) and among some professions such as traders and manual laborers (Morocco High Commission for Planning 2020). For the GCC economies, little is known about the impact on jobs, but evidence from Bahrain shows that while nationals did not suffer a large negative impact, the nonnationals interviewed in the survey were significantly affected, with the share of respondents having a primary job dropping from 81 percent before the pandemic to 59 percent a few months into it (Abdulla et al. 2020). This is largely attributed to the fact that many nationals work in the public sector and that the Bahraini government has injected considerable enterprise and wage support into the private sector since the beginning of the pandemic—including deferring loan installments.

By February 2021, some signs of recovery emerged in the surveys conducted in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia, including increases in labor force participation compared to November 2020. Employment rates also began to increase in Morocco (from 61 percent to 68 percent) and Tunisia (from 64 percent to 68 percent). Unemployment slightly decreased. However, the recovery a year into the pandemic appears to have been limited. This is especially the case for workers who were already vulnerable before the pandemic, namely informal workers and women, who have borne the brunt of the impact of the pandemic (Krafft, Assaad, and Marouani 2021).

These results demonstrate what many economies around the world already know: the recovery from the pandemic in terms of jobs and unemployment for the majority of the population will be slow. Despite the fact that some types of jobs have not come out as losers from the pandemic—namely, those that are based on digital skills—for the great majority of workers in the region, the jobs challenge remains a serious and difficult one. As variants of the coronavirus emerge throughout the world, the road to a full recovery remains a bumpy one.

1. Regional estimates by the flagship team using International Labour Organization (ILO) data, calculated as a weighted average, where the weight is the ratio between the estimated number of youth in the country and the overall estimated number of youth in the region.

2. Country estimates are from the ILO. Note that the ILO definition of “employment” is all those who are engaged in any activity to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit during a short reference period.

They comprise employed persons “at work”: that is, who worked in a job for at least one hour; and employed persons “not at work” due to temporary absence from a job, or to working-time arrangements (such as shift work, flextime, and compensatory leave for overtime).

3. Flagship team calculations based on Open Access Micro Data Initiative (OAMDI) 2019. Labor Market Panel

Surveys (LMPS), http://erf.org.eg/data-portal/. Version 2.0 of Licensed Data Files; ELMPS 1998–2018. Egypt:

Economic Research Forum (ERF).

4. These are estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

5. General Authority for Statistics, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, https://www.stats.gov.sa/en/820 (accessed May 2021).

6. Simulated probabilities are analyzed for this section. Probabilities were derived with a series of multinomial logit models estimated on a polychotomous outcome variable including various employment alternatives using Labor Force Surveys in Egypt over the period 2000–18; Jordan (2003–16); Iraq (2006–07 and 2012); Tunisia (2004–13); and West Bank and Gaza (2013–18). The employment status used depends on the specifics of the survey questionnaire and includes public employment, private formal wage employment, private informal wage employment, nonwage employment, unemployment, and out of labor force as the base/reference outcome.