# **1. Introduction**

With its rich history and large population, the Arab Republic of Egypt’s economy plays a pivotal role in the Middle East and North Africa region. Unsurprisingly the functioning of Egypt’s labor markets has garnered a lot of attention from academics and practitioners alike, especially since jobs creation for Egypt’s young population is seen as a key element of economic development and social cohesion.

Important work has been done to understand the Egyptian labor market. Assaad (2002), Assaad (2009), Assaad and Krafft (2015) and Assaad and Krafft (2022) provide a characterization of the evolution of the Egyptian labor market focusing on the youth bulge in the 1990s, reforms and global slowdown in the 2000s, and political upheavals in the 2010s. This literature has highlighted key trends in Egypt’s labor market including the long-term decline in female labor force participation combined with rising levels of education, the large gender gap in the unemployment rate, and the more recent decline in male labor force participation.

A complementary set of contributions has highlighted the lack of dynamism of Egypt’s labor market (Amer 2015; Assaad 2014; Assaad and Krafft 2016; Hertog 2020; Yassine 2015). Both transitions between labor market states and between sectors are infrequent. Even job-to-job accession and separation are rare (Yassine 2015). Private sector workers rarely move to the public sector, and vice versa (Assaad 2014; Yassine 2013). Women persistently – and indeed increasingly – stay out of the labor force (Assaad et al. 2020; Krafft, Assaad and Keo 2019) and unemployed youths still struggle to find jobs after finishing school (Amer 2015; Assaad and Krafft 2016).

While these papers outline the key contexts in which labor market transitions occur, the literature examining the actual transitions is considerably sparser and tends to focus on specific groups or specific stages of the life cycle (an exception is the earlier contribution of Gatti et al, 2012). Yassine (2015) takes an aggregate view of labor market transitions in Egypt, computing flow rates that characterize the level of dynamism in the labor market, primarily with the 2012 round of the ELMPS. The paper also provides an excellent vantage point to view the extent of rigidity in Egypt’s labor market relying on descriptive survival analyses over how long individuals would stay in one job. Meanwhile, Amer (2015) studies labor market insertion, focusing in particular on youth entering the labor market, and the time needed for insertion. Therefore, by construction Amer (2015) only studies transitions to the first job. The paper affirms Yassine’s (2015) finding on rigidity and adds further insights from a gender perspective, highlighting that women who obtain a formal job upon entry into the labor market end up staying longer in the labor market as opposed to women who obtain other types of employment.

Building on the existing rich compendium of notable work examining the employment profile in Egypt and labor market transitions for specific groups, our paper contributes to the literature in at least two ways. First, our paper provides a detailed discussion of Egypt’s labor market transition dynamics post-Arab Spring, focusing on the two most recent rounds of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey. Thanks to the panel structure of the data, we examine labor market transitions in Egypt between 2012 and 2018, tracking individual employment status and job trajectories between the two waves. While important work has been done to characterize the 2