| Abstract: |
The creation of job opportunities for the increasingly educated youth
population is a major current policy challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, even
though very little is known about the extent to which young workers in the
region are satisfied with the employment they currently have. This paper aims
to help to fill this latter gap by presenting an analysis of job satisfaction
of youth aged 15-29 in four countries from Eastern and Southern Africa:
Madagascar, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia. We estimate ordered probit models of
the degree of satisfaction in a respondent's main job, using data from the
School-to-work Transition Survey (SWTS). It turns out that while a majority of
workers are satisfied with their work, a large minority are not. We find that
being over-educated or under-educated for the current job is strongly and
negatively correlated with job satisfaction in all four countries. With
respect to employment status, we find that those who report having chosen to
be self-employed are substantially most satisfied in all four countries
compared to formal sector wage employees, after controlling for many other
factors. Formal wage employees are more satisfied than informal employees in
only two of the four countries. These results reinforce the case made by
Fields (2014) for not assuming that all self-employment is a 'last resort'.
They also raise questions about the quality of available wage jobs for young
people. |