A Time of Great Intensity: The Pandemic Effect on Work, Care Work and Subjective Wellbeing in MENA Countries

Ghada Barsoum and Mahdi Majbouri ()

No 1528, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: In 2020, a global pandemic and its ripple effects swept through the world and disrupted every economy worldwide. We study the effect of this pandemic on employment, care work, and subjective wellbeing (SWB), particularly for women, in four countries in one of the most understudied regions, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We find that although employmentto-population ratios had an initial dip in the pandemic, they rose to pre-pandemic levels by February 2021. We, however, find that unemployment-to-population ratios for women rose during the pandemic and reached to two to three times their levels before the pandemic. We also find that about 40% of women reported a rise in their hours spent on childcare and housework during the pandemic. Finally, we find that controlling for individual characteristics and geographic-time fixed effectgs, the main factor associated with the SWB was the decline in household income. Men and women’s SWB in households that experienced a reduction in their income declined by 0.26 and 0.14 standard deviation, respectively. Increase in the time spent on housework was the second factor affecting women’s SWB. All other factors had no association with SWB. The implications of the results are discussed.

Pages: 31
Date: 2021-12-20, Revised 2021-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-hap
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
https://erf.org.eg/publications/a-time-of-great-in ... g-in-mena-countries/ (application/pdf)
https://bit.ly/3ptPe88 (text/html)

Related works:
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:erg:wpaper:1528

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().