# **2.1 Unemployment in Egypt**

The analysis relies on data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). The Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey is a nationally representative survey conducted in Egypt since 1998 by the Economic Research Forum (ERF), in cooperation with Egypt’s statistical agency, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). The ELMPS has been administered to nationally representative samples in 1988, 1998, 2006, 2012, and 2018, and is a wide-ranging panel survey that covers topics such as employment, unemployment, job dynamics and earnings, as in a typical labor force survey, but also provides very rich information on education, residential mobility, migration, and socio-economic characteristics.<sup>4</sup> This section <mark>sheds light on recent unemployment trends in Egypt between 2012 and 2018, after the Arab Spring uprisings. It highlights in particular important gender differences in unemployment in Egypt, helping to explain the differential results obtained for men and women. Moreover, the analysis shows important disparities between urban and rural areas, highly educated and less educated individuals, as well as between younger and older age cohorts.</mark> Following the 2011 uprisings, male unemployment rates increased in Egypt (Figure 2). It should be noted that unemployment rates vary depending on the definition used. The market definition of unemployment, for instance, counts subsistence workers as unemployed individuals, while the extended definition of unemployment counts them as employed. The broad definition of unemployment does not require active job search, whereas the standard definition does. Depending on which definition is used, male unemployment rates in Egypt vary between 4.7 and 5.8 percent in 2018. The different definitions and the results they produce are informative, as they capture distinct dynamics regarding active versus passive job search and engagement in subsistence activities, which are particularly relevant for women in Egypt. Female unemployment rates have actually fallen between 2012 and 2018, as opposed to those of men. Striking differences, however, emerge when examining female unemployment rates in Egypt relying on these various definitions (Figure 3). When relying on the market definition of employment, female unemployment rates are higher, as a large proportion of Egyptian women engage in subsistence work. While female unemployment rates seem overall to have fallen between 2012 and 2018, women’s unemployment rates according to the broad unemployment (market definition) have increased. The latter suggests that the share of female discouraged workers, who are not actively searching for employment, actually increased. This pattern is consistent with the overall fall in female unemployment rates between 2012 and 2018.

Examining differences in unemployment rates between urban and rural areas by gender, Figure 4 and Figure 5 show that male unemployment rates are much higher in urban compared to rural areas, consistently across the two survey rounds. These figures and the following ones rely on the

> 4 See Open Access Micro Data Initiative, OAMDI (2016) for the data source and <mark>Assaad and Krafft (2013) for more information on the data and the sampling.</mark>

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