This meeting introduced the World Bank study, Shaping the Future: A Long-Term perspective of People and Job Mobility for the Middle East and North Africa. This study is about global labor and job mobility (that is migration and outsourcing) with a focus on Europe and MENA to illustrate potential imbalances and complementarities. It looks at long term global demographic and labor force developments to assess which parts of the world will experience aging populations and major declines in their labor force and which will see an expansion. The analysis indicates that there will be large demographic and labor force imbalances which may lead to a sharp acceleration of job and labor mobility in the future.

The study derives the policy implications including education and skills development, migration and outsourcing and social protection policies and develops a policy framework for both labor sending and receiving countries. Leila Zlaoui, the principal author of the report will present it's findings. This was followed by a presentation from Priya Deshingkar, Research Fellow at ODI, on unskilled and unreported migration.