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Women’s Participation in Labor Market in Egypt: Constraints and Opportunities
Abstract
Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP) is important for the country’s economic efficiency through improving women’s relative economic position. Improving women’s involvement in the economy is central for development and growth. The stagnation of the FLFP has negative impact on women’s bargaining power, her empowerment and her benefits from economic growth, which in turn would negatively affect female and children’s health and well being. Egyptian women labor force participation rate is very low hovering between 20% and 25% in the last ten years, compared to a global average of 52%. Despite the agreement on the necessity to provide insight on restrictions and incentives for women to enter the labor force in Egypt, the empirical analyses tackling this matter is relatively limited. Hence, this research is concerned with the determinants of women labor participation in Egypt. Given that the recent literature highlights the consequences of the different forms of market work that women can engage in for women ability to combine market work and child care. We are not only interested in determinants of participating or not, but also in the determinants of the different forms of participation. More precisely, the present research main interest is to identify main determinants of Egyptian female employment status, employed or unemployed. And if employed is it public, formal private or informal sector. In an attempt to identify policy actions required to enhance women‘s participation rate. Hence, we focus on four employment status: employed in public sector, employed in formal private sector, employed in informal private sector and not employed. Accordingly, our dependent variable is a polychotomous variable of four categories. We employ a multilogit model to account for that and use the “Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey” (EL.MPS) 2012 as our main data source. Determinants examined will include women individual socio economic characteristics, geographic regions, economic, income level and community context where the women live. Taking into consideration the social norms and community context is a central contribution of the current study, especially that such factors have been ignored by the empirical literature. Another important contribution is accounting for endogeniety of two major determinants of FLFP; age of marriage and fertility.
Discipline
Economics
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Development