Search results

The influx of expatriates to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has led to labor imbalance inducing these countries to initiate workforce nationalization policies. However, despite the policies' emphasis on increasing the presence of nationals in all sectors, employing nationals in the private sector is still a critical challenge for policymakers. This paper explores local job seekers' and employees' perceptions of employment choices in the private and public sectors.

Adopting a qualitative approach, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 28 local job seekers, either not currently employed or employed but seeking another job.

The data revealed a contextualized understanding of positive and negative connotations pertaining to employment in the private and public sectors in Qatar.

Understanding nationals' negative preconceived notions against working in the private sector and the perceived benefits of public sector employment lays the groundwork for developing measures to help policymakers to create labor market-oriented policies that stimulate mobility between the public and private sectors.

This study contributes to the workforce nationalization literature in the GCC countries by examining local job seekers' perceptions associated with employment in the private sector and the public sector. A closer examination of why nationals are hesitant to enter the private sector can propel the pendulum towards higher success rates of workforce nationalization.

The debate on the public sector has been central in structural adjustment programmes applied in developing countries during recent years. The common grounds of the discussion have been the size of the public sector, its role and its efficiency in delivering services. The common criticisms of the 1980s are that the public sector is too big, overstaffed and inefficient. Examines these issues under a long‐term perspective. Finds that at the aggregated level there is no clear‐cut evidence to support those criticisms of the size of the public sector in developing countries. Compared with industrialized countries, there is no particular evidence of the public sector being too big in the developing world. However, it appears that the sequence of the adjustment process has negatively affected the performance of important parts of the public sector by distorting the proportion of wage and non‐wage expenditures, disregarding their complementarity. The consequent imbalance between inputs and employment has resulted in practical overstaffing.

Governments in both developing and developed economies play an active role in labor markets in the form of providing both formal public sector jobs and employment through public workfare programs. The authors refer to this as employment targeting. The purpose of the paper is to consider different labor market effects of employment targeting in a stylized model of a developing economy. In the context of a simple search and matching friction model, the authors show that the propensity for the public sector to target more employment can increase the unemployment rate in the economy and lead to an increase in the size of the informal sector.

The model is an application of a search and matching model of labor market frictions, where agents have heterogeneous abilities. The authors introduce a public sector alongside the private sector in the economy. Wage in the private sector is determined through Nash bargaining, whereas the public sector wage is exogenously fixed. In this setup, the public sector hiring rate influences private sector job creation and hence the overall employment rate of the economy. As an extension, the authors model the informal sector coupled with the other two sectors. This resembles developing economies. Then, the authors check the overall labor market effects of employment targeting through public sector intervention.

In the context of a simple search and matching friction model with heterogeneous agents, the authors show that the propensity for the public sector to target more employment can increase the unemployment rate in the economy and lead to an increase in the size of the informal sector. Employment targeting can, therefore, have perverse effects on labor market outcomes. The authors also find that it is possible that the private sector wage falls as a result of an increase in the public sector hiring rate, which leads to more job creation in the private sector.

What is less understood in the literature is the impact of employment targeting on the size of the informal sector in developing economies. The authors fill this gap and show that public sector intervention can have perverse effects on overall job creation and the size of the informal sector. Moreover, a decrease in the private sector wage due to a rise in public sector hiring reverses the consensus findings in the search and matching literature which show that an increase in public sector employment disincentivizes private sector vacancy postings.

Job creation is the most important challenge facing Egypt today. Economic performance has been uneven over the last three decades, but even in periods of high growth, the job content of growth has not been strong enough to absorb new entrants. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the acceleration in the structural adjustments. The fast growing role of the private sector and the contraction of public sector employment are considered the most important characteristics of this period. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The findings of the paper support the view that sectoral shifts, in response to structural transformations, have been an important source of private employment fluctuations in Egypt, and the implications on aggregate employment have varied with the stage of the business cycle in the private sector. Moreover, one of the important findings of the paper shows that public sectoral shifts have caused stronger effects on private employment growth than private sectoral shifts do. However, failure to align public sectoral shifts with growth in the private sector has had a negative effect on employment growth, increasing aggregate unemployment.

The findings also confirm the crowding-out effect of higher government expenditure on private employment, particularly during a boom. Finally, the findings show that changes in domestic credit going to the private sector as a ratio of private GDP, and higher exports ratio to GDP have statistically significant positive effects on private employment growth.

Overall, the findings signify the importance of policies that aim at increasing the job content of private-led growth in Egypt.

How does wage employment differ from self-employment in Nigeria? The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of participation and the resulting wage differentials with respect to individual employees in self-employment, public-wage employment and private-wage employment in the Nigerian labour market.

Using the most recent cross-sectional data from the general household survey (GHS) panel for 2012/2013 wave (Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 2012), this paper applies the multinomial logit estimation for the sectoral choice and selectivity-corrected wage equation where appropriate.

Consistent with other studies in Africa, the findings confirm that the Nigerian labour market is heterogeneous. Factors affecting sectoral choices differ greatly across the analysed sectors. Education, age and geopolitical zones are observed to be the major determinants of sectoral participation. On the basis of BFG estimates, the authors find evidence of downward bias only in the public sector wages that is due to the (Bourguignon, Fournier & Gurgand) allocation of individuals with better unobservable characteristics out of the public employment into the self-employment. Consequently, the human capital variables become no longer significant in the public wage equation after correcting for selectivity bias. However, education and gender are found to be significant determinants of wages in the private and self-employment sectors. The magnitude of the gender coefficient is more negative in self-employment, which may imply a possible gender wage gap in that sector. While the North-East, North-West and South-South zones are highly statistically significantly different from zero in the public sector, only the South-South and South-West zones appear to be significant in self-employment. Hence, such zonal variables are a reflection of differences in economic incentives in Nigeria.

Given the unregulated and precarious nature of employment in self-employment, adequate policies that address gender bias orientations are suggested.

This paper is one of the first that addresses sectoral choices and wage differentials among public, private and self-employment using the most recent GHS data for Nigeria.

Starting with a comparative assessment of different welfare regimes and political economies from the perspective of gender awareness and “pro-women” policies, this chapter identifies the determinants of cross-national variation in women's chances of being in a high-status occupation in 12 West European countries. Special emphasis is given to size and structure of the service sector, including share of women in public employment and structural factors such as trade union density and employment protection. The first level of comparison between men and women concentrates on gender representation in the higher echelons of the job hierarchy, while the second section extends the scope of analysis, comparing women in high-status occupations and low-wage employment in order to allow for a more nuanced study of gender and class interaction. The first analysis is based on European Social Survey data for the years 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, capturing recent trends in occupational dynamics. Results indicate that in general a large service sector and a high trade union density enhance women's chances of being in high-status occupations, while more specifically a large public sector helps to reduce channeling women into low-wage employment. Thus, equality at the top can well be paired with inequality at the bottom, as postindustrial countries with a highly polarized occupational hierarchy such as the UK show.

The economic reforms and privatization in the wake of political changes in Poland after 1989 have led to rapid growth in the private sector. Although many new companies have been established, there has been a sharp increase in unemployment. Compared to the public sector, employees in the private sector tended to be less educated, younger and predominantly male. The private sector is also more dynamic, with higher rates of labor turnover, recruitment and separation, and average monthly wages were lower but, in recent years, have become close to those in the public sector. The Gini coefficient is higher in the private than in the public sector, showing that earnings are less equally distributed in this sector.

The uncompromising preference of citizens for public sector employment throughout the Middle East is not new. However, with the recent saturation of the public sector job market and demographic pressures, it has grown to become a problem of unpredictable economic and social consequences. This paper aims to explore the factors determining career choice behaviour and the underlying career expectations and perceptions of young citizens in one Middle Eastern country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the preference for public sector employment is not only very strong, but is also perceived as increasingly problematic.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with a total of 60 UAE citizens in the age group of 18‐23.

The authors explore and discuss cognitive, social, and institutional factors that influence the job‐seeking behaviour of young Emiratis and lead to negative attitudes towards the private sector. They further suggest potential causes of the very low private sector employment levels among UAE citizens and discuss their implications for policy makers. The authors argue for two main approaches: first, a focus on training and orientation of young citizens to enable them to confidently pursue job opportunities in the private sector. This may also include ways for providing young UAE citizens with private sector exposure, as 98 per cent of the national workforce is currently working in the public sector and a lot of what young UAE citizens think they know about the private sector is not founded in reality. Second, interventions to address structural and institutional challenges hindering employment of citizens including gaps in employment conditions and remuneration levels for citizens between the public and private employment sectors.

While much previous research in this field has focused on the perceptions of employers, this is the first paper to actually explore the perceptions of those at the centre of the discussion – young UAE citizens themselves.

Argues that the debate concerning the growth of public employment has remained largely uninformed in a conceptual sense beyond the economic variables. Suggests that the time is now pertinent to identify the additional parameters affecting the situation if an enriched understanding is to evolve on the future role and management of the public sector in the developing state. Reviews the literature contributions that are significant in this respect, not only with the aim of putting the public sector developments of the last ten years in perspective but also to contribute to the current debate on the emergence of new administrative paradigms for developing States that provide a more balanced view of political, economic and social development.