On 9 October 2026, VoxEU, the policy portal of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), published the column “A Mediterranean Community of Human Capital”, by Hakim El Karoui, President of the Committee, and Marc Reverdin, Secretary General. It is part of CEPR’s Europe 2050 initiative, a foresight exercise on the future of the European Union.
The diagnosis
In 1951, six European countries pooled their coal and steel. By 2050, the resource Europe and its southern neighbours have to pool could be people.
The EU fertility rate fell to 1.34 children per woman in 2024, and Eurostat projects that without migration the Union’s working-age population could fall by around 20% by 2050. South of the Mediterranean, universities produce more graduates each year than local labour markets can absorb. A European policy that only recruits trained workers transfers the cost of their training to the South: Morocco trains about 2,100 doctors a year and loses about 600 of them; Algeria loses about 2,000 of the 3,000 it trains.
The proposals
- a European map of labour shortages by country, sector and occupation, matched against training capacity on the southern shore;
- co-training: European co-financing of vocational and higher education in partner countries, with curricula designed with employers;
- mutual recognition of qualifications in priority sectors;
- a share of the return on mobility paid back to the training country and reinvested in its education system, on the model of FIFA training compensation.
Five European pilots of the Global Skill Partnership model are already running, including a Tunisia-France partnership in plastics manufacturing. The column proposes to scale this approach up to the whole Mediterranean.
These proposals build on the Committee’s 2026 report, The Mediterranean through Work: a Partnership for the Future.