The first victims of Covid-19 in developing countries? The most vulnerable workers to the lockdown of the Tunisian economy

Mohamed Marouani and Phuong Le Minh
Additional contact information
Phuong Le Minh: UMR « Développement et Société », IRD and Université Paris1-Panthéon-Sorbonne

No DT/2020/06, Working Papers from DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation)

Abstract: While the Covid-19 pandemic had both health and economic e ects in rich countries, the first wave impacted many developing countries’ mainly through its economic and social consequences. The objective of this paper is to perform a first-round assessment of the potential consequences on workers using the Tunisian labor force survey. Three main factors of vulnerability are investigated, the inability to work from home, being part of a non essential industry and working for the private sector. We find that the most a ected are craftsmen, machine operators and elementary occupations in non-agricultural activities. The typically vulnerable worker is a young individual with low education, a man if self-employed and a woman with a temporary contract and lower earnings if wage-earner. When we take into account self-employed workers, the managers’ category becomes the most a ected among high and medium skill occupations. When we look at regional e ects, we unexpectedly find that the coastal regions (except the capital) are the most fragile. This is due to the fact that most of the manufacturing, tourism and international transport activities are located in coastal regions.

Keywords: teleworking; employment; COVID-19; lockdown; vulnerability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J61 O30 R12 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dial.ird.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/202 ... Tunisian-economy.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The first victims of Covid-19 in developing countries? The most vulnerable workers to the lockdown of the Tunisian economy (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt2020-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Loic Le Pezennec ().