The Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey: Introducing the 2012 Round

This paper introduces the 2012 round of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS), a nationally representative, publicly available survey. We introduce the key characteristics of the ELMPS, including the samples and questionnaires for each survey round and information on access to the micro data. Additionally, this paper describes the data collection process in the 2012 round and examines the attrition processes observed in the panel and discusses the creation of weights to correct for this attrition. We also compare our data to other statistical sources for Egypt to evaluate the representativeness of the sample. To demonstrate how the collection of the high quality data provided in the ELMPS allows for a substantially improved understanding of labor market trends and conditions, we present a comparison of unemployment trends based on other sources and the ELMPS. For many years, the rich and publicly available data of the 1998 and 2006 rounds of the ELMPS have been the workhorse of labor market research in Egypt. The public release of the ELMPS 2012 provides an important opportunity for researchers to better understand the Egyptian labor market in the wake of the global financial crisis and the January 25th revolution.  

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