An economy is judged less by what it produces in good times than by how it endures storms. For a long time, Tunisia had at its disposal for this a discreet shock absorber: its industry. It wears out quietly, and the country is beginning to feel its tremors.
No spectacular closure announces it, no collapse makes the front page. This is what makes the phenomenon formidable. While the public debate focuses on institutional reforms, social tensions, or the rise of the digital sector, the productive base is slowly retreating, without anyone truly defending it.
This is the finding presented in a policy brief published by the Association of Tunisian Economists (ASECTU), with the support of the Savoirs éco project, funded by the European Union and implemented by Expertise France. The note, titled “Neither robotic nor protected: Tunisia’s industry in decline,” gathers data that sketch an alarming trajectory.
From a third of the economy to just under a quarter
In the mid-1990s, industry accounted for nearly 30% of gross domestic product. In 2023, it represents only 23.5%. Manufacturing, the core of the productive apparatus, has fallen from over 17% to 15% of GDP. These curves do not depict a hiccup but a slope, established over three decades.
Employment follows the same path. Around 30% of the active workforce worked in industry in the 1990s; it now employs less than 20%. And the future is not reassuring.
433 factories, and everything that lived around them
Between 2019 and 2022, 433 units closed: 138 in textiles, 73 in food processing, 42 in construction and materials, 180 in other sectors. Each figure hides a knock-on effect. According to some estimates cited by the research note, one industrial job eliminated would lead to the disappearance of two to three indirect jobs: staff transport, catering, maintenance, logistics, training.
It is the interior regions that pay the heaviest toll. In Gafsa, Kasserine, Le Kef, Siliana or Tataouine, the factory offered stable jobs, often unskilled but structurally important. When it closes, youth unemployment among graduates sometimes exceeds 30% in certain areas, informality takes over, and emigration, to Europe as well as to the big cities, becomes the only visible prospect.
When the shock absorber fails, the shocks pass straight through
