Between Hope and Despair: Egypt's Revolution and Migration Intentions

Yvonne Giesing and Reem Hassan

No 9237, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study the effect of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath on migration intentions of the Egyptian youth. We measure revolution intensity using the spacial variation in the number of deaths during the revolution from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution Wikithawra and combine it with data on migration intentions from the Harmonized Survey of Young People in Egypt (HSYPE). Difference-in-difference estimations show that the revolution significantly decreased the migration intentions of youth, especially young men. Single women did not change their migration intentions, mainly due to their financial dependence. Results also show that the youth living in informal slum areas experienced stronger effects. We describe two opposing channels: the insecurity channel, which positively affects migration intentions, and the optimism channel, which negatively affects migration intentions by inducing hope in a better Egyptian future. Youth in rural and slum areas were more sensitive to the optimism channel, due to their higher threshold of insecurity perception.

Keywords: political instability; migration; Egypt; revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F22 O15 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-ara, nep-isf and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9237.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:ces:ceswps:_9237

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().