Background Paper: The Change in Quality of Employment (QoE) in Egypt Over Time (2006-2018)

This background paper was prepared by Kirsten Sehnbruch, Rocío Méndez Pineda and Samer Atallah. Kirsten Sehnbruch is a British Academy Global Professor and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Rocío Méndez Pineda is a Research Assistant at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE and an MSc candidate in Social Research Methods at UCL. Samer Atallah is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Business of the American University in Cairo. The authors appreciate the research assistance of Hebatullah Korashi, researcher at APS, and the comments and suggestions of participants in interviews and the consultation session.

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Introduction

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, job creation continues to remain a primary concern for policymakers all over the world. However, focusing solely on the number of jobs gives a partial picture, as wellbeing and economic sustainability also depend on the quality of available jobs. This issue remains more relevant in emerging markets and developing countries, where earnings are low, social security systems lack coverage, informality remains high and many formal jobs are highly precarious despite their formal status. Considering these difficulties, it is necessary to focus on measuring employment quality in conjunction with other conventional employment indicators. 

In developed countries, the quality of employment (QoE) has been studied and measured by academics, international organizations and policymakers. During the 2000s, job quality had been central to the European Union’s (EU) employment strategy, positioned through the ‘more and better jobs’ agenda (European Commission, 2001). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) put forward by the United Nations (UN) include “decent work for all” as an objective. In 2015, the G20—the forum of governments and central banks of developed countries—signed the Ankara Declaration. This declaration commits governments to strengthening job quality, in order to achieve sustainable growth that would improve living standards. Furthermore, academics have worked to understand the causes, trends and consequences related to job quality (Addison et al., 2018; Brown et al., 2007; Burchell et al., 2014; Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011; Díaz-Chao et al., 2016; Findlay et al., 2017; Gallie, 2007; Green & Livanos, 2015; Green, 2013; Sehnbruch, 2008). However, little consensus exists in both academic and institutional literature on how to measure progress toward this goal.

This lack of consensus as to what decent work, job quality or QoE really mean has led to a plethora of definitions. Contentious views regarding the necessary dimensions to be included in the conceptualization, as well as differences over what constitutes minimum standards of QoE, have produced a significant degree of conceptual variance and a concomitant lack of reliable measurements (Burchell et al., 2014). Furthermore, the absence of a coherent theoretical framework for understanding and measuring QoE has been a significant difficulty for defining useful public policy approaches to the subject. More recently, however, Sehnbruch et al. (2020) have developed a measure for QoE in Latin America, which has also been replicated by Apablaza et al. (forthcoming). As this paper will illustrate, this methodology is also applicable to other regions in the world, especially to other developing countries. 

The importance of employment quality has also been accentuated by the impact of globalization, artificial technology and international shocks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers acknowledged that precarious jobs leave workers wholly unprotected and may lead to further medium- and long-term negative effects on wellbeing and employment (Blustein et al., 2020; Fana et al., 2020). Furthermore, a precarious labor market is ill-prepared for the job losses that technological advances and the advent of artificial intelligence may generate (Berg, 2019; Schulte et al., 2020). In particular, workers in precarious employment experience little investment in their human capital, which leaves firms with a shortage of qualified workers capable of working alongside technological advances.

This paper proceeds as follows: after a brief review of the Egyptian case and why we think it is pertinent to measure QoE in Egypt, this paper will review the existing international and regional literature before explaining the methodology used in this paper. We will then discuss how this methodology has been adapted to the Egyptian context and which data sources we have used to calculate a QoE index for Egypt. Section 4 then presents the results of this index and uses a probit model to discuss the key mediating variables of employment quality in Egypt. The paper concludes with a preliminary policy discussion of the research’s implications.