‘Mind the mismatch?’ Incidence, drivers, and persistence of African youths' skill and educational mismatches

Abstract

This paper examines the incidence, drivers, and persistence of skill and educational mismatches among employed youths from 10 African countries surveyed between 2012 and 2015. Results indicate that, unlike most findings from developed countries, underskilling and undereducation are more prevalent among the youth than overskilling and overeducation. The levels of education of the youth and their parents, the field of study, the quality of job and the firm size are found to be key predictors of job mismatches. Our results also show that the perspective of unemployment has a scarring effect for underskilled youths but a stepping-stone effect for overskilled and overeducated. Using a pseudo-panel approach, skill and educational mismatches of youths are found to be persistent over time and the likelihood of transitioning into education matching jobs is significantly increasing with the levels of education.

Overeducation in Arab Labour Markets; Different Measures, Different Outcomes

“…In Egypt, overeducation increased from 6% in 1998 to 11% in 2018 and is more likely to affect males than females. The results are comparable to those published by the International Labour Office, using a cross-sectional 'school-to-work transition survey", in 2012 (Barsoum et al, 2014) and another recent study that used the same dataset and measured overeducation among 10 African countries, including Egypt (Morsy & Mukasa, 2020). Both studies measured the incidence of overeducation in 2012 only; however, the current study was able to measure it across the time, which helps to observe the overall trend.…”

Education to Work Transition: An Interpretive Inquiry of Status and Struggle of Pahari Youth

“…The incidence of skill mismatch is associated with poor education, and mismatched youths are more likely to live in rural areas and larger households. Similarly, youths in vulnerable employment such as self-employment, working without a contract or on a short-term contract, and in the agricultural sector were more likely to experience skill deficits and a lack of appropriate level of education (Morsy & Mukasa, 2020). Similar circumstances applied to the participants in this research, the majority of whom were doing temporary jobs that required insufficient abilities.…”

School dropout and overeducation in developing economies: Feasibility of a budgetary solution†

“…Duncan and Hoffman (1981) and Verdugo and Verdugo (1989) show that even though overeducated workers receive positive significant returns, they receive less than that of the appropriately matched workers. The literature also provides recent evidence on overeducation in developed (Cultrera, Mahy, Rycx, & Vermeylen, 2022;Kracke, Reichelt, & Vicari, 2018) and developing countries (Castro, Ortega, Yamada, & Mata, 2022;Battu & Bender, 2020;Morsy & Mukasa, 2020). According to ILO (2020), Madagascar has a large share of overeducated workers (23% in 2015) among low-income countries.…”