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# **Introduction**

Endowed with natural resources and home to 2.9 million people, Mauritania is a low-income country, with gross domestic product (GDP) of US$ 2.7 billion and per capita gross national income (GNI) of $938 (World Bank, 2008). The country’s economy has been dependent on natural resources since the 1950s: iron ore first; then combined with fisheries; and more recently oil, gold and copper. The country has gone through massive structural changes. Whereas at independence (1960) barely onefifth of the population was settled in towns and villages, nomads today constitute less than 5 percent of the population. The severe drought of the late-1960s and early-1970s caused many Mauritanians to seek refuge in the cities and the sharp increase in aid flows made it possible for most of them not to return to their rural homelands.<sup>2</sup> As a result, the importance of agriculture and – to a lesser but still significant extent – livestock, has diminished overtime, due to the demise of traditional livelihoods (Auty and Pontara 2008).<sup>3</sup> Mauritania has not been able to substantially improve the well-being of the population in recent years. Poverty is still pervasive, affecting 46.7 percent of the population, and mainly a rural phenomenon, as the rural poor made up approximately 75 percent of all of Mauritania’s poor. Between 2000 and 2004, the overall poverty incidence declined from 51 to 46.7 percent, the net effect of declining poverty in rural areas (from 66 to 59 percent) and increasing poverty in urban areas (from 28 to 29 percent, Table I). Over the same period, the Gini coefficient remained at 0.39, indicating that the moderate decrease in poverty did not make a dent on inequality.4 The 2007 Human Development Index (HDI) ranked Mauritania 137th of a total of 177 countries (UNDP 2007). In addition, recent work conducted by the World Bank concluded that with current resources and policies Mauritania is highly unlikely to reach most of the Millennium Development Goals (see Magnoli-Bocchi et al., 2008).

This paper represents the first attempt to analyze the Mauritanian labor market, on the basis of the data of the 2004 National Household Survey (EPCV 2004), which is the most recent and reliable source of labor market data in Mauritania. While the authorities have aimed in recent years to reduce the incidence of poverty by including the promotion of labor-intensive non-oil growth in their poverty reduction strategies (GIRM 2000, GIRM 2006), the country has so far not fully managed to: (i) diversify the sources of growth besides the exploitation of natural resources and the tertiary sector;

> 2 The post-colonial capital, Nouakchott, dominates the urban settlement hierarchy and hosts over 50 percent of the urban population and around a quarter of the national population (GIRM 2000).

> 3 In 2006, services accounted for 40 percent of GDP, agriculture and livestock 30 percent (with livestock making up just less than two-thirds of this magnitude), mining 12 percent, oil 12 percent, and fisheries 6 percent (IMF 2007).

> 4 Concerning the working-age population (15-64 years), 44 percent lives in a poor household and 26.6 percent in an extremely poor household (Table 2).