Unlocking the potential of Jordan’s labour market

Jordan faces persistently high unemployment and low labour force participation particularly among women and youth following decades of jobless growth.
Despite the high levels of education of its workforce and a series of forward-looking reforms Jordan’s labour market continues to underperform both regionally and globally. Evidence from Jordan and the rest of the world makes clear that there is no single factor driving this underperformance and hence no simple policy solution.
Achieving the ambitious aims of the Economic Modernisation Vision and the National Women Strategy including doubling female labour force participation and accommodating more than a million young Jordanians into the labour market by 2033 will require new ways of thinking about the challenges and new policy approaches including new interventions and combinations of interventions that can be robustly tested to identify what works. This paper presents a new framework for thinking about labour market policy.
The framework starts from the recognition that increasing labour productivity is essential to enabling the poorest households to graduate from poverty and across the spectrum of incomes to support increasing living standards over time. 
The framework identifies three fundamental productivity transitions in individuals’ engagement in the labour market that provide key focal points for policy. The framework also provides new insights into Jordan’s labour market dynamics.
The paper provides a comprehensive overview of these dynamics with the aim of generating actionable insights.
It reviews international evidence on policy interventions to increase productivity create jobs and raise incomes. Finally the paper uses the new framework to outline a policy agenda for Jordan that includes some policies for consideration and key areas for future research to support the reform agenda.