Panama, this same difference is between 20 percent and 57 percent and in Uruguay it is between 34 percent and 66 percent. The **number of children** is also important but this depends also on the age of the children. The probability of participation drops by about 3 to 5 percentage points for each additional child with the effect being stronger for women with **children below the age of six** . In fact, the presence of **older children** increases the probability of female participation in some countries. The presence of **adult non-workers** in the household decreases the probability of female participation.

These same factors have also emerged in other studies on emerging economies. A study by Contreras and Plaza (2010) on Chile confirms the Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos (1991) results. The article also examines cultural values that influence female labor participation and finds that **conservative cultural values** tend to decrease participation to an extent that this factor can compensate for the positive effect of human capital variables. Ejaz (2007) looked at Pakistan and found that age, educational attainment, marital status and number of children are all important predictors of participation. Chen et al. (2014) studied FLP rates in China and found that household and individual factors played a different role in urban and rural areas with individual factors being more important in urban areas and household factors being more important in rural areas.

The evidence on the MENA region remains scarce for the reasons already outlined in the introduction. Chamlou et al. (2011) looked at Amman in Jordan and found that higher education (post-secondary/university/post-university) has a positive and significant impact on FPR whereas secondary and less than secondary do not. In addition, there is a strong negative and statistically significant association between **traditional social norms** and the participation of women in the labor force. To our knowledge, there are only two unpublished papers that have studied FLP in Morocco. The first paper, by Assaad and Zouari (2003), used the 1990-1991 Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) to estimate the impact of marriage and fertility on FLP in urban Morocco. It found marriage to be a constraint only in relation to paid employment, children of school age reduce women’s participation, and education or education of the father increases women’s participation. The second paper paper, by Taamouti and Ziroili (2011), used the Moroccan LFS and analyzed the individual determinants of female labor participation in urban areas for the period 2000-2010. This paper found that age and education significantly influence women’s decision to join the labor force while married and widowed women and women with children have lower participation rates.

This paper extends the work on FLP in MENA countries and in Morocco in various directions. It uses two distinct sets of data and models to study medium-term and short-term factors affecting FLP: a regional panel data set based on macro data to study medium-term macro and seasonal determinants of FLP and an individual panel data set based on LFSs micro data to study shortterm individual and household determinants. We will also compare cross-section results from the 2007 LFS and HBS surveys cross-validating results from the two different data sources.

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