Mismatch in the Egyptian labor market

Caroline Krafft and Carmen Armas Montalvo

No 1739, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: High rates of unemployment and non-participation in the labor market are often attributed to labor market mismatch. This paper examines the mismatch between job seekers' expectations and Egypt's labor market realities. For the non-employed, analyses examine reservation wages and what occupations the unemployed would accept. For the employed, analyses explore skills and educational attainment relative to the skill and educational requirements of their jobs. The results demonstrate that the non-employed generally have reasonable wage expectations and are willing to accept public sector jobs, but these jobs, and to some degree formal private sector jobs, are not readily available. The non-employed, and especially women, are less likely to accept more readily available informal private sector employment. As a result of women being more selective in what employment they accept, among the employed, women's skills and qualifications better match their job requirements than men's, although overeducation and over-skill are substantial issues for both men and women. There are not differences in overeducation by vocational secondary specialization or among most higher education specializations, suggesting a pervasive problem of mismatch throughout the education system.

Keywords: Mismatch; labor markets; education; skills; unemployment; reservation wages; Egypt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J21 J23 J24 J31 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/339993/1/GLO-DP-1739.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:1739

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().