Period Without a Job After Returning from the Middle East: A Survival Analysis

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s Pakistan has faced return flows of its workers from the Middle East on a large scale. The re-employment experience of returning workers has usually been examined by focusing on the unemployment rate. This paper concentrates on ‘duration of unemployment’ and examines the influences of socio-demographic characteristics of returnees and their households on the transition from being ‘not employed’ to being employed by estimating the proportional hazards model. The 1986 ILO survey of return migrant households is the data source used in this study. The majority of returnees who were ‘not employed’ (unemployed and inactive) had been without a job for more than one year. Nearly one-quarter of them had not been working for more than two years. The analysis shows that variables indicating the human capital of return migrants, such as age, education, occupation and work experience, appear to have greater influence on their re-employment probabilities than variables related to economic position, such as savings.