Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey Research Articles

Cheaper by the Dozen: Family Size Effects on Children’s Educational Attainment in Egypt

Education is a crucial determinant of child quality. Economic theory and empirical research suggest a trade-off between the quantity and quality of children. Larger families facing tighter constraints are likely to distribute resources among children unevenly, which can adversely affect educational investment in some children within the same family. This paper investigates the effects of the number and order of siblings on children's educational attainment in Egypt; a developing country that has been overlooked in the literature. For this purpose, we use the Egyptian labor market panel survey between 2006 and 2012. We control for parental family income, age at birth, and other family-level attributes. We find that a child with more siblings is likely to complete elementary school, but less likely to have a high school degree. Our findings are robust to several specification checks. We build on these findings to inform policy making in the areas of education and family planning.

Revisiting the Impact of Trade Openness on Informal and Irregular Employment in Egypt

This paper examines the impact of trade openness on job quality through the evolution of the shares of informal and irregular employment in total employment. In fact, Egypt has undertaken several liberalization waves and reforms of the labor market (1998-2012). Moreover, the economy has been subject to several events leading to a severe political instability which in turn affected production, exports, employment and employment conditions. Indeed, informal and irregular employments have exacerbated in the wake of the political turmoil of 2011. Thus, combining a microeconomic dataset (the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey) with macroeconomic variables (tariffs), we try to assess to what extent trade reforms affected informal/irregular workers in Egypt. Our main findings show that there is a positive association between tariffs and both informal and irregular employments in Egypt. While the effect on informality is robust, the one on irregularity is not.

Technological Change and Its Impact on the Labor Market in Egypt

The current study aims at analyzing the impact of technological change and innovations on the labor market in Egypt. Using the panel data of Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) 1998, 2006, and 2012 as well as the initial year of ELMPS 1988, a quadratic form of equation for employment is estimated and two approaches were applied. The first one is collaborated by applying the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation method and taking the difference between the rounds of the ELMPS database; three regressions were estimated for the following, namely total labor force (males and females), a regression for male workers as well as another regression for female workers on wage and wage squared. The second approach is estimated by applying the panel model techniques using the Fixed Effects Model as well as the Random Effects Model to analyze the impact of technological change on the Egyptian labor market. Results of the study reveal that the impact of technological change on employment is evident in the years 2006 and 2012 causing job polarization in the Egyptian labor market as revealed in the first approach. Moreover, the findings show that in the second approach there exists a J-shaped relationship between employment growth and wage and wage squared as control variables. The present study provides an overview of the related literature; moreover, it addresses and analyzes the impact technological change has on the labor market. Finally, the paper provides policy recommendations for forward-looking labor market policies in Egypt.

Living Arrangements and Socio-Economic Conditions among Egyptian Elderly. The Determinants of Late-Life Family Structures

Egypt is facing the dual challenges of being both young and rapidly transitioning. Population structure is changing, with main effects on several dimensions of individual and social life, which include family structures and relations. We aim to analyze the conditions of the elderly and to evaluate whether or not household structures, as well as the living arrangements of the elderly, have changed in recent years. Moreover, we aim to individuate the determinants of late-life living arrangements: independent living or co-residence. Trends in late-life living arrangements and intergenerational ties derive fromthree rounds of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) carried out in 1998, 2006 and 2012. To assess which respondents’ characteristics are related to the individual living arrangement a multinomial regression model, where the dependent variables are represented by the household types, has been implemented in 2012 data. Men and women live the latter part of their life in different living arrangements and relationships. Moreover, findings underlined situations of poor material conditions and poor health. Data confirma need for policy interventions to meet long-term needs of the elderly, taking into account the raising trend toward living alone or in households with only elderly members. In particular, it is essential to discover the channels of intervention in the rural areas of the country to protect the elderly from poverty, as many researchers have already pointed out.

Who Is Covered and Who Under‐reports: An Empirical Analysis of Access to Social Insurance in Egypt

AbstractThis paper investigates the dynamics and determinants of having access to social insurance coverage on the Egyptian labour market among wage and non‐wage workers. The paper explores two issues: the worker‐level and firm‐level determinants of having access to social insurance and the risk of under‐reporting insurable wage to the social security authority. With the use of data from the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey of 2006 and 2012, the likelihood of being enrolled in social insurance is estimated by a probit regression model for all workers, for wage and non‐wage workers, separately. The potential endogeneity between the type of work and social insurance access is addressed using instrumental variables approach. Results show that men, older, married, better educated and white‐collar highly skilled workers are more likely to be socially insured. Under‐reporting insurable wages is positively correlated with working outside the establishment and basic monthly wage, while it is negatively correlated with tenure and white‐collar occupations. High contribution rates requested from both the employer and employee, combined with basing benefits on wage level of the last few years of service, and the weak capacity of law enforcement encourage employers and employees to either not participate in the social insurance system or contribute on amounts that are lower than their actual wage. This paper is one of the few studies that focus on the phenomenon of coverage gap and under‐reporting salaries to the social security administration. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Economic Analysis of Supply Functions, Private Returns to Investment in Education and Skill Mismatch in Egypt

Education provides good health, empowerment and employment to all people in the society. Accordingly, education can make a lifelong difference in individuals’ lives. It is proved that, on average, there is a positive relationship between each additional year of schooling and the income of an individual. The main objective of this paper is to estimate the demand and supply functions for schooling in Egypt using the data of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey 2012. It is estimated that the private rate of return to education is 4.5%. Moreover, the rate of return to the number of years of experience is 2.6%, i.e. each additional year of experience will increase the earnings of an individual by 2.6% on average. It is concluded that individuals from poor families have an increased likelihood of receiving financial aid, which decreases their discounting rate of interest.

Is there an informal employment wage penalty in Egypt? Evidence from quantile regression on panel data

This is the first study that uses panel data to assess the magnitude of the informal sector wage gap in Egypt. We consider the private sector male wage earners in Egypt and examine their wage distribution during 1998–2012 using the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey. We estimate Mincer wage equations both at the mean and at different quantiles of the wage distribution taking into account observable and unobservable characteristics with a fixed effect model. We also consider the possibility of nonlinearity in covariate effects and estimate a variant of matching models. We find a persistent informal wage penalty in the face of extensive sensitivity checks. It is smaller when unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, and unlike many previous studies, there are very few differences across the conditional wage distribution. We also examine the informal wage penalty over time and in different subgroups according to age and education. The informal wage penalty has increased recently over time and is larger for the higher educated and the young.

Women’s empowerment in Egypt: the reliability of a complex construct

Women’s empowerment, defined as the process where women acquire enabling resources that enhance their agency, is a strategy employed to improve women’s reproductive health. Agency is conceptualised as the ability to define life choices. However, measures of women’s agency, such as household decision-making, are thought to be unreliable. Null and negative associations between women’s empowerment and reproductive health are often attributed to weak measures of empowerment that are perceived to lack validity and reliability. This study uses the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey and the 2008 and 2014 Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey to examine the reliability of measures of women’s agency by considering the effects of women’s individual and household characteristics on women’s agency. Both surveys are nationally representative, from similar time periods and include the same measures of agency – household decision-making and attitudes towards intimate partner violence (IPV). Negative binomial regression models of individual and household determinants of agency demonstrate the degree to which the measures secure consistent results upon repeated application. Results show that the same individual, household, and spousal characteristics were consistently associated with decision-making and attitudes towards IPV in the two surveys. Findings support the conceptualisation of women’s empowerment as household decision-making and attitudes towards IPV in Egypt. This also offers promising evidence for use of these measures in reproductive health research, in women's health programmes, and as part of strategies to improve women’s empowerment.

What empowers Egyptian women: resources versus social constrains?

Purpose This paper aims to tackle an important question related to women’s economic empowerment in highly patriarchal societies like Egypt. The paper discusses individual, household, wealth and location factors determining women empowerment, as measured by two dimensions: decision-making power and mobility. Design/methodology/approach Using the “Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey” (ELMPS) 2012, a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model was estimated to study the main economic resources and social constraints that determine women empowerment as measured by the power of women over household decisions and her freedom of movement in Egypt. Findings Three key messages could be delivered. First, women’s own economic resources as captured by her employment status are an important source of her empowerment. Second, contrary to theoretical prediction education is not playing its expected role in developing awareness and transforming ideas concerning gender roles in Egypt. Third, the importance of social local context is fundamental for Egyptian women empowerment. Originality/value This study is an attempt to address some of the gaps in the literature for the Egyptian case, where there is a lack in rigorous studies measuring women empowerment and examining its determinates. This is done by first, tackling multiple dimension of women’s empowerment, decision-making inside households and freedom of mobility. Second, using MIMIC model, which is a modeling approach that allows for studying the relations between several causes of a given latent variable, such as “Empowerment” in our case, and a number of its possible indicators, without a directly observable measure of the latent variable. Third, using the most recent set of data; the ELMPS 2012 which has a special focus on women’s resources and agency that permits greater content validity of the multidimensional setup. Forth, the macro level differences in women’s status are tackled through using location dummy variables. Finally, given the important correlation between wealth level and women empowerment, the paper is considered a first attempt to analyze such impact by including a variable that captures the wealth level of the woman’s household as one determinant of empowerment.

Private tutoring and parents decision to work more: evidence from Egypt

ABSTRACTWe study the effect of private tutoring (PT) on parents' decision to work more using a sample from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey in 2012 and apply a semi-parametric recursive bivariate probit model to control for endogeneity. Our finding shows that PT increases father propensity to work overtime by about 2 percentage points (pp) and a father's propensity to work a secondary job by about 4 pp. The increase in mother propensity to work is significantly high where it reaches 27 pp. In the urban areas, the effect is insignificant for the father but exceeds 37 pp for the mother.

Longitudinal determinants of married women’s autonomy in Egypt

This article explores determinants of women’s autonomy in Egypt around the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011. We show that women’s autonomy over time is a product not only of their individual characteristics, but also of the household and community environment in which they live. Using the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) and multilevel models, results demonstrate that women’s autonomy changes over time. There are large and consistent variations in women’s autonomy by household region of residence and wealth. For example, women in the rural and urban Upper Egypt region are less autonomous than women in the Cairo region, and women in wealthier households are less autonomous compared to the poorest households. Programs aiming to increase women’s autonomy focus exclusively or primarily on women’s own characteristics. These results indicate that strategies to improve women’s autonomy should be mindful of the multiple dimensions of autonomy and have a programmatic focus on changing household and social environments.

Arab spring protests and women's labor market outcomes: Evidence from the Egyptian revolution

We analyze the effects of the 2011 Egyptian protests on the relative labor market conditions of women using panel data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Using unique information from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, we geocode each “martyr”, i.e. demonstrators who died during the protests, based on the location of the political incident. We construct our measure of the intensity of the protests – the district-level number of “martyrs” – and rely on a Difference-in-Differences approach. We find that the 2011 protests have reduced intra-household differences in labor force participation by increasing women's employment and unemployment relative to men. Women's employment relative to men increased in both the private and informal sectors. Our estimates suggest how economic uncertainty such as the one associated to the recent protests may undermine the importance of cultural factors and attitudes towards female work. We link these findings to the literature showing how a relevant shock to the labor division between women and men may have long run consequences on the role of women in society.

Ever married women’s participation in labor market in Egypt: constraints and opportunities

ABSTRACTThis research studies the individual, households and community determinants affecting Egyptian woman’s decision to enter the labor force and affecting her employment status. Using the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey ELMPS, 2012, five probit models were estimated for ever-married women. The first model is about Egyptian women’s decision to participate in the labor force. Once she is in the labor force, the second model studies the determinants of being employed. Among employed women, three employment types are tackled in the remaining three models; being employed in the public sector (model 3), being a private wage worker (model 4) and being self-employed (model 5). As found in the literature, the results show that there is a strong dependence between woman’s education and employment type. Moreover, the results confirm the role played by the mother’s employment status in her daughter’s labor force participation. Finally, the community characteristics play a significant role in affecting women’s decision in entering the labor force. Once society accepts the integration of women in the labor market and not only being responsible for care and house work, individual characteristics and households characteristics influenced her decision of which employment type to choose.

Public Versus Private Sector Wage Gap in Egypt: Evidence From Quantile Regression on Panel Data

This paper considers the public and private sector wage earners in Egypt and examines their wage distribution during 1998-2012 using Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey. We estimate the public-private sector wage gap with Mincer wage equations both at the mean and at different quantiles of the wage distribution. In this process we take into account observable and unobservable characteristics of the individuals using the panel feature of the data with a fixed effects model. We address sector of employment selection issue for both males and females. We find that there is very little evidence of sample selection in our data. Therefore, we present both the selection corrected results and the results with no selection correction.We find a persistent public sector wage penalty for males and public sector wage premium for females in the face of extensive sensitivity checks. They are larger when unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account for males but insignificant for females. They are similar across the quantiles for males but, smaller at the top than at the bottom of the conditional wage distribution for females. We further examine the public sector wage gap over time and in different sub-groups according to age and education. The public sector wage penalty for males has decreased recently over time and is larger for the better educated and younger. We also find substantial regional differences in public sector wage gap for males.

Women’s Age at First Marriage and Long-Term Economic Empowerment in Egypt

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 calls on nations to promote gender equality and to empower women and girls. SDG5 also recognizes the value of women's economic empowerment, entailing equal rights to economic resources and full participation at all levels in economic decisions. Also according to SDG5, eliminating harmful practices-such as child marriage before age 18-is a prerequisite for women's economic empowerment. Using national data for 4,129 married women 15-43 years who took part in the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS 1998-2012), we performed autoregressive, cross-lagged panel analyses to assess whether women's first marriage in adulthood (at 18 years or older, as reported in 2006), was positively associated with their long-term post-marital economic empowerment, measured as their engagement in market work and latent family economic agency in 2012. Women's first marriage in adulthood had positive unadjusted associations with their market work and family economic agency in 2012. These associations persisted after accounting for market work and family economic agency in 2006, pre-marital resources for empowerment, and cumulative fertility. Policies to discourage child marriage may show promise to enhance women's long-term post-marital economic empowerment.

First birth and the trajectory of women\u2019s empowerment in Egypt

BackgroundWomen’s empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women’s empowerment over time. Fertility may cause changes in women’s empowerment, or they may be mutually influencing. Research on women’s empowerment and fertility relies on cross-sectional data from South Asia, which limits the understanding of the direction of association between women’s empowerment and fertility in other global contexts. This study uses two waves of a panel survey from a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt, to examine the trajectory of women’s empowerment and the relationship between first and subsequent births and empowerment over time.MethodsUsing longitudinal data from the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, a nationally representative sample of households in Egypt, for 4660 married women 15 to 49 years old, multilevel negative binomial, ordinary least squares, and logistic regression models estimate women’s empowerment and consider whether a first and subsequent births are associated with empowerment later in life. Women’s empowerment is operationalized through four measures of agency: individual household decision-making, joint household decision-making, mobility, and financial autonomy.ResultsA first birth and subsequent births are significantly positively associated with all measures of empowerment except financial autonomy in 2012. Women who have not had a birth make 30% fewer individual household decisions and 14% fewer joint household decisions in 2012 compared to women with a first birth. There is also a positive relationship with mobility, as women with a first birth have more freedom of movement compared to women with no births. Earlier empowerment is also an important predictor of empowerment later in life.ConclusionsIncorporating the influence of life events like first and subsequent births helps account for the possibility that empowerment is dynamic and that life course experiences shape women’s empowerment. This and the notion that empowerment builds over time helps portray women’s lives more completely, demonstrates the importance of empowerment early in the life course, and addresses issues of temporality in empowerment fertility research.

Empowerment is a Community Affair: Community Level Determinants of Married Womenns Empowerment in Egypt

This paper examines the contextual and community-level determinants of multidimensional women’s empowerment in Egypt, while accounting for the usual individual and household level factors typically included in studies of women’s empowerment. The paper analyzes two dimensions of women’s empowerment: the decision-making and the mobility dimensions by means of two indices constructed from various survey questions relating to these dimensions. We use data from the Population Census of 2006 and the Demographic Health Survey of 2008 to construct community and governorate-level contextual variables to complement the individual-level data we obtain from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2012 (ELMPS 2012). In line with the literature, the determinants that are relevant to the decision-making and mobility dimensions of women’s empowerment turned out to be quite different, confirming that “empowerment” is a multi- dimensional phenomenon, with women relatively empowered in some aspects of their lives but not in others. Moreover, our results show that context plays an important role in determining women’s empowerment in Egypt after controlling for a variety of individual and household-level characteristics. These results highlight the importance of viewing women’s empowerment, and hence development as social and normative transformations rather than as just resulting from shifts in individual conditions, attitudes and behaviors. Thus, empowering Egyptian women will require changing community norms and values about gender relations rather than simply providing greater educational and employment opportunities for women.

Asset Inequality in MENA: The Missing Dimension?

The vast majority of existing studies gauging economic inequality rely on current household income or consumption expenditures. Since wealth is distributed more widely across households, and household wealth is related positively to income and consumption, overall inequality is likely to exceed inequality measured by income or consumption alone. Wealth should thus be included in the measurement of inequality, in tandem with them. Moreover, since wealth is not only an outcome but a productive factor and an important driver of lifetime opportunities of all household members, it is important to understand its distribution across households in different demographic groups, countries and points in time. This study examines economic inequality in four MENA countries – Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan and Tunisia – using measures of wealth based on productive and non-productive household assets (including livestock, farm equipment and capitalization of firms owned by households), and using high-quality partially harmonized panel surveys. In Egypt and Ethiopia, household wealth and its distribution is tracked across multiple survey waves of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey and the Ethiopian Socio-Economic Survey. This is done by applying the relative prices of all assets from benchmark years to other years. The study reports the degree of inequality in the wealth index within countries, and across regional and other demographic dimensions. Comparisons of wealth distributions across countries, and their evolution over time (in Egypt and Ethiopia) are made, and implications for households’ welfare are discussed. Wealth distribution is juxtaposed with the distribution of household wage earnings or consumption to gauge the degree of multidimensional inequality, and the relationship between productive and non-productive assets is estimated.

Migrating out of a crowded labor market: evidence from Egypt

We analyze the determinants of emigration at the individual and household level, using three waves of the Egyptian labor market panel survey (ELMPS) covering the 1998–2012 period. Exploiting the panel structure of the data allows us to reduce the risk of reverse causality and to estimate the effect of migrant networks more accurately than in studies based on cross-sectional data. We confirm, in the Egyptian context, the non-linear relationship between household resources and migration propensity, due to migration costs; a larger network of past emigrants from the same community mitigates this selection on wealth, increasing the propensity to migrate among poorer households. We also show that unemployment and informal employment act as incentives to emigrate, suggesting that the scarcity of quality jobs, in particular on the skilled labor market, is one important driver of emigration flows in Egypt. However, these incentives turn into effective migration only in communities with a sufficiently large network of past migrants.

A Multilevel Analysis of Unemployment in Egypt

AbstractDespite its recent economic development, Egypt's employment inequalities among gender and different age cohorts are still an unresolved issue. In this work we apply a Multilevel Generalized Linear Mixed Model to the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey 2006 (ELMPS 2006) and 2012 (ELMPS 2012). By exploiting the hierarchical structure of the survey data, we investigate how the interplay between individual characteristics and regional context affects Egyptians’ individual probability of being unemployed. Moreover, we attempt to identify if and how these same characteristics have changed between 2006 and 2012 as a consequence of the major changes that re‐shaped Egyptian demographics, labor market structure, and young cohorts’ educational achievements.