Dr. Mohamed Amara

  (Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales de Tunis, Université de Tunis / Tunisia)

Mohamed Amara received his master’s degree in economic modeling from the Higher Institute of Management of Tunis in 2004, before undertaking a PhD in Geography at the university of Paris I and a PhD in management (quantitative Methods) at the university of Tunis in 2010. In 2016 Dr. Amara joined the Department of Economics of Higher School of Economic and Commercial Sciences of Tunis as an associate professor of quantitative methods. From January to March 2019, he was a Research Follow in the department of Economics at the university of Oxford. Amara’s research focuses on development economics, regional sciences, labor market, youth and gender in MENA region, and applied micro-econometrics. He has published in a range of journals on a variety of topics such as the Annals of Regional Science, Social Indicators Research, Annals of Economic and Statistics, Papers in regional science, Middle East development Journal, and Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences.

Project Inequality & Mobility

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia: a storm in a teacup ?

The issue of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia has been the subject of an open national debate, widely reported by the media since the Arab uprisings of 2011. The outbreak of the Libyan conflict at the end of February 2011, pushed many hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to move to Tunisia in the hope of returning to their countries. Since 2014, the number of Sub-Saharans has tripled raising  a serious problem of their social and economic integration in Tunisia. In fact, the arrival of migrants results in an increase in the overall labor supply of the workforce. The resulting supply are driven by the degree of substitutability or complementarity between immigrant labor, locally produced labor, and the other factors of production. The purpose of this study is to analysis the economic and social integration of sub-Saharan immigrants into local labor markets in Tunisia. Using 2014 population Census data and the unique first national survey on International Migration (Tunisia Households International Migration Survey – 2021 Tunisia – HIMS), we examine labor market integration patterns of sub-Saharans migrants compared to local residents with a focus on migration flows taking place after the Tunisian uprising of 2010-11.

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