Egyptian Labor Market Survey (ELMS) (1998)

Collaborating institutions

The Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS)

Sponsor

Funding for this project came from the Ford Foundation, the Economic Policy Initiative Consortium (EPIC), and the World Bank

Related publications

Zibani, 1999

Contact person

Ragui Assaad

For more details

 

Objectives of the Study

Based on the data collected in the October 1988 round of the LFSS (Labor Force Sample Survey ) as a baseline for the study, this survey aimed to assess the major changes in labor market conditions that occurred during the period from 1988 to 1998, a period of significant economic reform and structural adjustment. A major objective of the project was to assess the impact of structural adjustment .....

Survey Design and Implementation

The Egypt Labor Market Survey is a national-representative household survey covering 5,000 households. These households were selected from a CAPMAS master sample prepared in 1995. The master sample consists of 750,000 households in 500 primary sampling units (PSUs) each consisting of 1500 households. Since the master sample is the basis for the survey sample, we find it necessary to start by explaining how the master sample was extracted in the first place. 

The master sample was extracted through a two-stage process. The country was first divided into two strata : urban and rural. Each stratum was in turn divided into substrata representing each governorate. All the villages (in the case of rural strata) or shiyakhas (urban quarter, in the case of urban strata) in each substratum were listed and assigned a weight based on their population. The first stage consisted of choosing the villages and shiyakhas that would be represented in the sample based on the principal of probability proportional to size. This meant that a shiyakha or a village is possibly selected more than once if its warrants that. The selected shiyakha and village are then divided into PSUs of approximately 1500 housing units each; then one or more PSUs are selected from each shiyakha or village. The selected PSUs were then re-listed in 1995 to enumerate all the households selected. As for the ELMS survey sample, 200 PSUs were selected from the master sample. The desired number of PSUs in each substratum was selected from the number available in the master sample using a systematic interval. Cairo and Alexandria were deliberately over-sampled and rural areas under-sampled to increase the probability of obtaining women wage-workers in the private sector, which tend to be concentrated in Metropolitan areas. A self-weighted sample would have yielded too few of these individuals, which constitute an important target group for this study.

Twenty- five housing units were then randomly selected from the 1500 housing units listed in each of the selected PSUs.

Data collection and implementation of the health component of the survey extended for two months (November 1,1998 to December 20, 1998).



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@ Social Research Center
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