out in cooperation with CAPMAS (Anker and Anker 1989). The survey indicated that in the oneweek reference period 12% of Egyptian women participated in wage or salary employment, 37% participated in market work, and nearly 80% participated in “standard” work, which is the equivalent of the extended work definition (market plus subsistence work).

In October 1988, a special round of the Labor Force Survey was carried out (Fergany 1990). The special round adopted the resolution of the 13th ICLS held in 1982, which states that “persons engaged in the production of economic goods and services for own and household consumption should be considered in self-employment” and therefore as a labor force participant (Anker 1983; ILO 1982). However, there was no way of operationalizing the 13th ICLS condition for this kind of work to count as employment, which stipulates that such work should only be included in employment “if such production comprises an important contribution to the total consumption of the household.” In practice, all production and processing of primary commodities for purposes of own household consumption ended up being included.<sup>4</sup> Furthermore, no separate measures for market and subsistence work were reported. As shown in Figure 1, this extended definition of employment resulted in a large increase in the measured female labor force participation rate to 31%, with the rural rate reaching over 41%. This definition was maintained in theory in subsequent rounds of the LFS, but its application gradually waned as less emphasis was placed on the inclusion of subsistence work. As a result, the measured FLFP rate in the LFS declined to 22% in 1990 and 17% in 1992, stabilizing at that level for a couple of years and then declining further to 15% in 1997. The measured FLFP rate remained roughly at that level through 2003, with the urban rate exceeding the rural rate in 2001 and 2002 for the first time since the early 1980s.

In the meantime, the first wave of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) was conducted in 1998 as a collaboration between the Economic Research Forum and CAPMAS (Assaad and Barsoum 2000). That questionnaire made a clear distinction between market and subsistence work and included a series of eight questions about specific activities to detect employment in a short reference period of seven days and long reference period of three months for those who answered that they were not working in the seven-day reference period. As shown in Figure 1, this resulted in a somewhat higher measured FLFP rate overall (16%), and a much higher rural rate of 20% even when explicitly limiting the definition of employment to market work. A similar approach was followed in the 2006 wave of the ELMPS (Assaad 2009), but the number of detection questions was increased to 13. This resulted in an even higher overall rate of 22% and a rural rate of 23%.

Based on the experience gained from the ELMPS surveys, CAPMAS made further efforts to improve the measurement of the FLFP rate. Although the questionnaire used in the LFS did not explicitly change to include the innovations introduced by the ELMPS until the first quarter of 2007, there were substantial increases in the measured FLFP rates in the LFS as early as 2004 as seen in Figure 1. Since 2007, the LFS questionnaire explicitly distinguishes between market work and subsistence work, the distinction subsequently adopted by the 19<sup>th</sup> ICLS, and includes a series of 12 keyword detection questions for those reporting not working in the 7-day reference period.

4 The 19th ICLS held in 2013 further limited the definition of “employment” to work for pay or profit (or market work) and defined other forms of work, which include “own-use production work” (ILO 2013).

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