School-to-work transitions for egypt’s youth

Abstract

School-to-work transitions for egypt’s youth Ragui Assaad from Humphrey School of Public Affairs, at the University of Minnesota, argues that structural reforms result in increasingly difficult and unequal school-to-work transitions for Egypt’s youth. Egypt adopted a series of structural reforms since the 1990s designed to curb the size of the public sector and place the economy on a market- oriented trajectory. While these reforms succeeded in shrinking the size of the public workforce from 39% of total employment in 1998 to 26% in 2018, they failed to ignite job creation in the private sector (Ragui Assaad, AlSharawy, and Salemi 2022; Amer, Selwaness, and Zaki 2021). The share of formal private wage employment in total employment increased marginally from 8% in 1998 to 12% in 2018, while overall employment failed to keep up with population growth (Ragui Assaad, AlSharawy, and Salemi 2022).