Policy Research Reports

Egypt COVID-19 Country Case Study

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Publisher

ILO and ERF

Date

June, 2022

Topic

J2. Demand and Supply of Labor

J1. Demographic Economics

Abstract
Author(s)

In a nutshell

Because of its relatively modest lockdown measures, Egypt’s economy was somewhat less affected by the pandemic than some of its North African counterparts.
The government of Egypt undertook a number of health, economic, and labor market measures to address the pandemic.
Although labor market indicators saw some degree of recovery from February to June 2021, household welfare measures, such as income and food security, were slower to recover.
Despite some recovery in employment and unemployment rates, the recovery is not complete. Persistent shares of both men and women employed in February 2020 were still out of work in June 2021.
Although formal wage workers were relatively protected from income declines and saw their work hours recover, informal wage workers, whose incomes are much more dependent on the volume of work they can find, experienced a decline and recovery of their wages, but no increase in their work hours from February to June 2021.
Like informal wage workers who are much less protected from fluctuations in economic activity, a substantial and increasing proportion of self-employed workers saw their incomes fall relative to pre-pandemic levels.
As in the case of income, there was not much improvement in the food security situation of households from February to June 2021. Similarly, a higher fraction of households had to pursue coping strategies to address falling incomes over time.
Household access to government assistance other than food ration cards was limited to about 15 per cent. Assistance was initially well-targeted to more disadvantaged groups but was then extended to less disadvantaged groups such as public sector and formal private sector workers.
Small and medium enterprises experienced substantial recovery from the first to the second quarter of 2021, but, like households, microenterprises saw a continued deterioration of their situation from February to June 2021.
A majority of micro, small and medium enterprises reported difficulties in accessing both inputs and customers and substantial loss of demand, with relatively little change over time.
Microenterprises were much less likely than their small and medium counterparts to adopt measures to limit physical contact with their clients such as using phones or digital means of communication. Two-thirds of microenterprises and small and medium enterprises were unable to access government support programs. When they were able to access such support, the most common type of support received was business loans.
Although a growing number of school-age children were able to get back to in-person schooling, married women with school-aged children experienced an increase in their care work responsibilities between February and June 2021.
A substantial majority of those interviewed reported low levels of wellbeing as measured by the WHO-5 scale, but even more worrying, this proportion increased from February to June 2021, especially among women.

The webinars, reports and papers are supported by the project “Advancing the Decent Work Agenda in North Africa (ADWA’)”, implemented by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). The project aims to promote job-rich growth, International Labour Standards (ILS) and their application at the enterprise level. It works at the policymaking level in order to support evidence-based decisions on key dimensions of the Decent Work Agenda. This project was made possible by the generous contributions of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Agence Française de Développement (AFD), The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the Government of the United Kingdom, the World Bank and the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development (AFESD).