Mortality in Algeria has declined significantly since the country declared its independence in 1962. This trend has been accompanied by improvements in data quality and changes in estimation methodology, both of which are scarcely documented, and may distort the natural evolution of mortality as reported in official statistics. In this paper, our aim is to detect these methodological and data quality changes by means of the visual inspection of mortality surfaces, which represent the evolution of mortality rates, mortality improvement rates and the male-female mortality ratio over age and time. Data quality problems are clearly visible during the 1977–1982 period. The quality of mortality data has improved after 1983, and even further since the population census of 1998, which coincided with the end of the civil war. Additional inexplicable patterns have also been detected, such as a changing mortality age pattern during the period before 1983, and a changing pattern of excess female mortality at reproductive ages, which suddenly appears in 1983 and disappears in 1992.

L’objectif de cet article est de comprendre les raisons du déficit en couverture sociale de l’Algérie. Selon l’Office national des statistiques (ONS, 2013), 73 % de la population occupée du secteur privé ne possèdent pas de sécurité sociale. Ce système offre pourtant juridiquement une couverture contre tous les risques sociaux (maladie, maternité, maladie professionnelle, accident de travail, invalidité, décès et retraite). Il est obligatoire pour toutes les catégories de la population active occupée. Malgré cela, la demande d’assurance sociale reste faible. Pour expliquer ce phénomène, nous étudions tout d’abord, les fondements micro-économiques de la protection sociale qui nous fournissent les principales variables déterminantes de la demande d’assurance. Cela nous permet, dans un second temps, d’élaborer un questionnaire utilisant des méthodes expérimentales pour mesurer ces variables. Enfin, nous testons les effets de ces variables sur la demande d’assurance sociale en Algérie. Cet article présente ainsi les premiers résultats de notre enquête.

State legitimacy and effectiveness can be observed in the state’s approach to delivering welfare to citizens, thus mitigating social grievances and avoiding conflicts. Social security systems in the Maghreb countries are relatively similar in their architecture and aim to provide social insurance to all the workers in the labor market. However, they suffer from the same main problem: a low rate of enrollment of workers. Many workers (employees and self-employed) work informally without any social security coverage. The issue of whether informal jobs are chosen voluntarily by workers or as a strategy of last resort is controversial. Many authors recognize that the informal sector is heterogeneous and assume that it is made up of (1) workers who voluntarily choose it, and (2) others who are pushed into it because of entry barriers to the formal sector. The former assumption tells us much about state legitimacy/attractiveness, and the latter is used to inform state effectiveness in delivering welfare. Using the Sahwa survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labor market in three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who voluntarily choose informality, an aspect that is missing from previous studies. Finally, this article proposes policy recommendations in order to extend social security to informal workers and to include them in the formal labor market.

Le système de retraite algérien est généralement perçu comme un système contributif, avec toutefois une redistribution partielle. Ce travail présente un double objectif : d’une part, confirmer la redistributivité du système de retraite en Algérie, d’autre part, déterminer si cette redistribution, verticale, aboutit à une réduction des inégalités relatives au niveau des pensions de retraite. Pour cela, nous présentons tout d’abord une étude prospective du système de retraite algérien. Ensuite, et en suivant une approche actuarielle, nous calculerons les taux de rendement interne (TRI) individuels d’un échantillon d’assurés nés entre 1945 et 1950. À la lueur de ces informations, nous tenterons d’analyser les inégalités dans les niveaux de pensions en Algérie.

State legitimacy and effectiveness could be seen by the way to deliver welfare to citizens to mitigate social grievances, that could eventually lead to conflicts (Kivimäki, 2021). Social security systems in Maghreb countries are quite similar in their architecture and aims to provide social insurance to all the workers in the labor market. However, they suffer from the same main problem: the low rate of enrollment of workers. Many workers (employees and self-employed) work informally without any social security coverage. The issue of whether informal jobs are chosen voluntarily by workers or as a strategy of last resort is controversial. Many authors recognize that the informal sector is heterogeneous and it is made up of workers who voluntary choose it and others who are pushed inside because of entry barriers to the formal sector (Günther & Launov, 2012). Using the SAHWA survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labor market in three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who voluntarily choose informality, which is missing from previous studies. Finally, this article proposes policy recommendations in order to extend social security to informal workers and to include them in the formal labour market.