Education, Jobs, and Equity in the Middle East and North Africa

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.