Working Paper T6. The Development Impact of Temporary International Labour Migration on Southern Mediterranean Sending Countries.
Abstract
This paper is based on an extensive literature survey of the changing perspectives of labour emigration from North Africa and a range of interviews with key actors in ministries, international organisations, NGOs and research institutes in Egypt and Morocco, carried out between October 2003 and March 2004. It falls into three sections. The first section traces the intellectual history of research and policy on the relationship between labour migration and economic development in Egypt and Morocco. Significant work in this area dates back to the mid 1960s and many of the themes developed in the earliest work remain surprisingly relevant today. This is developed in the second section which draws out key themes from previous work and brings in interview data to formulate a series of priorities for considering the development effects of future labour migration schemes. The third section turns to existing agreements, using the priorities established in section two to analyse one bilateral agreement governing labour mobility from each country: the 2001 labour migration agreement between Morocco and Spain and the the 2001 Integrated Migration Information System Project (IMIS) based on a cooperation between the Italian and Egyptian governments, facilitated by IOM. Finally, in the conclusion, this analysis is related back to current debates on the temporary movement of labour across the Mediterranean, and more widely, with the aim of relating European objectives to a Southern Mediterranean perspective.
Citation
WP-T6, Sussex, UK, DRC on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty, 54 pp.
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