THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS ON THE LABOUR MARKET IN TUNISIA

Abstract

This paper aims at studying macro aspect of the virulent impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the Tunisian economy during the 1970 – 2010 period using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL). Our results prove that the crisis has a significant and negative effect on the real GDP per capita. They also show that the labour market was affected through two different transmission channels namely: the exports and the Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). We discovered that the FDI had a long run significant and positive impact on the real GDP per capita but at a weak coefficient. Similarly, we found that there was a bidirectional relationship between the real GDP per capita on the one hand, and the exports, the FDI and the unemployment rate respectively, on the other, which promoted the spread of the crisis in Tunisia.