This paper provides an overview of the employment experience in the Middle East and North Africa in the past two decades. The oil boom of the 1970s and the resulting international migration permitted an expansion in public sector employment and a redistribution of the labor force from countries...

It is quite challenging to operationalize the notion of job quality for wage and salary employment, and even more challenging to devise a measure of job quality for non-wage workers. This paper takes up this challenge and attempts to provide a measure for job quality among the self -employed and...

The main challenge tackled by this study is to estimate a structural equation for children's employment as a function of parental and own wages, which are assumed to be simultaneously determined with the child?s employment status. The results indicate that employment of children is responsive to...

The main objective of this paper is to determine the causal relationship between child work and school enrollment in Egypt while taking into account the simultaneous nature of family (or child) decisions regarding school and work activities. We also assess how a broader definition of work,...

Cross-section data on non-contractual construction workers in Egypt reveal strong attachment to the sector despite demand instability. Also present are statistically significant wage differentials between construction trades. Preliminary examination suggests that employers might be compensating...

Because the Egyptian labor code contains stringent job security provisions, the focus of this paper is on voluntary severance programs. An efficient voluntary program would achieve its exit target by matching compensation payments to the individual-specific losses that workers incur by leaving...

This paper examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the Egyptian labor market. Besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force, these policies encouraged queuing for government jobs and...

This paper examines whether private employers are able to pass the cost of protective social regulations to their workers in the form of lower wages. I answer this question by decomposing wage differentials between protected and unprotected workers into components explained by differences in...