Entry, exit and net job creation in Tunisia: an exploratory analysis

Hassan Arouri (), Adel Ben Youssef and Francesco Quatraro
Additional contact information
Hassan Arouri: National Institute of Statistics

Eurasian Business Review, 2016, vol. 6, issue 3, No 5, 323-337

Abstract: Abstract This paper analyzes the impact of small firms’ entry and exit dynamics on net job creation in Tunisia during 2000–2013. Our descriptive and exploratory econometric analyses exploit a database of the population of Tunisian firms; the results support the idea that small firms in a developing country, such as Tunisia, play a key role in the creation of new jobs. We also explore the role in these dynamics of a specific tax regulation, the régime forfaitaire, which has been designed to benefit only small firms. We find that small firms benefiting from this taxation scheme account for most of the job creation effects for this firm size group. This effect is persistent across sectors. However, despite their dynamism, small firms show very weak economic performance. Thus, this preliminary analysis suggests that small firms in Tunisia have a strong social impact in the form of new job creation, but a weak economic impact in terms of wealth creation. A possible interpretation of these findings and one which requires further investigation, is that small firms’ entry rates are driven mostly by necessity entrepreneurs, while the skilled workforce, which currently is largely unemployed, does not contribute to this process through the creation of innovative start-ups.

Keywords: Tunisia; Developing countries; Industrial dynamics; Entry; Exit; Net job creation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40821-016-0064-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eurasi:v:6:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s40821-016-0064-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40821

DOI: 10.1007/s40821-016-0064-2

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Business Review is currently edited by Marco Vivarelli

More articles in Eurasian Business Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().