This report is the product of the collaborative effort of a core team led by Roberta Gatti and comprising Diego Angel-Urdinola, Joana Silva, and András Bodor (principal authors); Kimie Tanabe (data management); and May Wazzan, with important contributions from Mohamad Alloush, Carole Abi Nahed Chartouni, Anne Hilger, Arvo Kuddo, and Matteo Morgandi.
Many colleagues have provided useful inputs at different stages of this report, including Surani Abeysekera, Rita Almeida, Luca Etter, Alvaro Forteza, Maros Ivanic, David McKenzie, Jaime Saenz, Amina Semlali, and Andrew Stone. Background papers were written for this report by Mohamad Alloush, Diego Angel-Urdinola, Mehdi Benyagoub, András Bodor, Carole Abi Nahed Chartouni, Yoonyoung Cho, Yohana Dukham, Mario di Filippo, Norman Loayza, Daniela Marotta, Shaumik Paul, Amina Semlali, Joana Silva, Kimie Tanabe, Tomoko Wada, and George Wellner. Amy Gautam edited the report.
We are grateful to the participants of the consultations held in Cairo (September 2010), at the International Labour Organization (ILO)–World Bank labor market course in Turin (October 2010), and in Tunis (March 2011) for their insights into the nature of informal employment in the Middle East and North Africa region. We thank our peer reviewers, Ahmed Galal, William Maloney, and Milan Vodopivec, for their guidance; Gordon Betcherman and William Maloney for useful discussions; and Jean-Pierre Chauffour, Prof. Alia Abdel Monem El Mahdi, Sherine El-Shawarby, Caroline Freund, Santiago Herrera, Robert Holzmann, Ruslan Yemtsov, and the participants of the brainstorming workshops that were held at the World Bank and at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, in October 2009, October 2010, and May 2011, for their valuable comments. Through this report, four new surveys were cosponsored (Egypt youth, Morocco youth, Lebanon Labor Force Survey, Syria employer-employee matched module). We acknowledge the productive collaboration to structure the questionnaires with Gloria La Cava, Yaa Oppong, David Robalino, Haneen Sayed, and Tara Vishvanath. We are grateful to the Social Security Corporation of Jordan for sharing data on social security contributions.
This work was supported by the Arab World Initiative. We thank Shamshad Akhtar and Steen Jorgensen for their strategic guidance.