IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2023-219.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Why Is Tunisia’s Unemployment So High? Evidence From Policy Factors

Author

Listed:
  • Aymen Belgacem
  • Jérôme Vacher

Abstract

Tunisia has one of the highest unemployment rates within the Middle East and Central Asia. We look at the extent to which institutional factors explain those high unemployment levels. We also assess unemployment cyclicality, by looking at the determinants of labor market sensitivity to the output gap. We find that during the last decade the deterioration of institutional factors that affect labor demand explain not only about a quarter of the unemployment rate increase in Tunisia, but also Tunisia’s excess sensitivity of unemployment to the output gap. Our results suggest that an improved business environment and product market competition, increased labor market flexibility as well as reduced financial constraints and informality would help reduce Tunisia’s unemployment.

Suggested Citation

  • Aymen Belgacem & Jérôme Vacher, 2023. "Why Is Tunisia’s Unemployment So High? Evidence From Policy Factors," IMF Working Papers 2023/219, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2023/219
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=539628
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2023/219. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.