Excluded generation: the growing challenges of labor market insertion for Egyptian youth

ABSTRACT

Youth in Egypt hold rising aspirations for their adult lives, yet face an increasingly uncertain and protracted transition from school to work and thus into adulthood. This paper investigates how labor market insertion has been evolving over time in Egypt and how the nature of youth transitions relates to gender and social class. The study examines 19,925 respondents from the 2012 wave of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey. We demonstrate that recent youth cohorts face poorer chances of transitioning into a good job than previous cohorts, despite large increases in educational attainment. Social class is playing an increasing role in determining the success of the transition from school to work in Egypt. Whether youth successfully make transitions to formal jobs, embark on such transitions and fail, or pursue more traditional careers in informal employment or family businesses or farms depends on a complex and changing interaction between their own educational attainment and the resources of their families. In light of these findings, we discuss the policies that can help facilitate more successful transitions for struggling youth in Egypt.

KEYWORDS:

• Transition from school to work
• youth
• adulthood
• life course
• Egypt

Data availability statement

The ELMPS 2012 data are publicly available to researchers through the Economic Research Forum Open Access Microdata Initiative: www.erfdataportal.com

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All of the ELMPSs are nationally representative once sample weights are applied. We use weights for all analyses. See Assaad and Krafft (2013) for more information on the ELMPS.

2 This is the first job that lasts more than six months or the first status after leaving school, whichever is earlier. Only 7% of non-student working-age adults (ages 15–64) in the ELMPS started a first job before leaving school (median of three years before). These jobs were typically of long duration, with a median of 9 years. Since these are typically jobs that persist substantively after school exit we include such jobs in our definition of first job. Very few (2% of working-age non-students) had interruptions in schooling, so we do not adjust our definitions in any way to account for interruptions.

3 In the data, intermittent work in the same occupation and industry, e.g. working as a construction worker on different sites and for different employers, is considered a single position.

4 We focus on father’s education as a measure of socio-economic background rather than occupation for two reasons. First, education has strong explanatory power for inequality and occupation has little additional explanatory power (Assaad, Krafft, et al. 2018; Krafft and Assaad 2015). Second, education data are better measured than employment outcomes in the retrospective data (Assaad, Krafft, and Yassin 2018). We focus on father’s education rather than adding mother’s education as well, as the two are highly correlated and, since we are already assessing the relationship between father’s education, own education, and cohort in shaping labor market outcomes, adding mother’s education as an additional variable would create empirical and interpretation challenges. We tested using a single variable combining mother’s and father’s education and results were substantively similar.

5 We decided not to disaggregate those with secondary education by father’s education since the vast majority of them had fathers with less than secondary education (see Figure 3).

6 What we refer to as parents’ wealth is a household level variable based on an asset index of housing quality and durable goods estimated using factor analysis, a common approach (Filmer and Pritchett 2001). We do not use the contemporaneous wealth distribution of the individual’s household since we wish to use wealth as a measure of social background rather than as an outcome of a youth’s transition. We use parents’ wealth in 2006 for individuals in the youngest cohort in 2012 who were living with their parents and whose parents were heads of households in 2006. About 77% of the youngest cohort who were present in both the 2006 and 2012 rounds of the ELMPS were living with their parents and their parents were the head of the household and/or the head’s spouse in 2006. In 2006, 29% were working and may have been contributing towards household assets. Therefore, we also check for similar patterns using 1998 parental wealth, when these individuals would have been even younger, and 91% were living with their parents. Just 4% were working in 1998. Both instances provided a similar distribution of parental wealth by our proposed youth taxonomy.

7 See Assaad (2013) and Krafft and Alawode (2018) for further evidence on the importance of family background in accessing higher education in Egypt.

8 See Barsoum (2004) for a discussion of how private sector employers in Egypt use class markers as indicators of worker quality.

9 Migration may provide a potential route for men to (temporarily) improve their employment opportunities and facilitate a more modern transition, but opportunities to migrate are limited and cannot fully offset unequal opportunities within Egypt (Wahba 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Silatech.