Author

Adrian Troyer

Date of Award

January 2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Economics & Finance

First Advisor

Chih Ming Tan

Abstract

An apparent labor recovery success story since the turn of the century has been the reduction of Algeria’s post-war high unemployment rate. However, there are reasons to doubt the effectiveness of government programs that induced the adding of large totals of short-term, low-paying jobs, particularly following new labor legislation in December 2004. By nature, this added employment has not been genuine permanent work for the educated that might be associated with labor productivity and economic growth. We use dynamic panel models with Arellano-Bond estimators by the generalized method of moments to suggest that Algeria has not exhibited the expected positive economic growth associated with its employment growth. We then use interrupted time series regressions to illustrate the behavior of the economy after 2004 and find significant negative level changes in both GDP growth and productivity that are not exhibited by a control group of nations.

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