Labor Market Panel Survey, ELMPS 2018, Egypt

The Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, carried out by the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in cooperation with Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Over its twenty-year history, the ELMPS has become the mainstay of labor market and human development research in Egypt, being the first and most comprehensive source of publicly available micro data on the subject. The 2018 wave of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) is the fourth wave of a longitudinal survey carried out by the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in cooperation with the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). The 2018 wave follows previous waves in 1998, 2006 and 2012. Over its twenty-year history, the ELMPS has become the mainstay of labor market and human development research in Egypt, being the first and most comprehensive source of publicly available micro data on the subject. The ELMPS is a wide-ranging, nationally representative panel survey that covers topics such as parental background, education, housing, access to services, residential mobility, migration and remittances, time use, marriage patterns and costs, fertility, women’s decision making and empowerment, job dynamics, savings and borrowing behavior, the operation of household enterprises and farms, besides the usual focus on employment, unemployment and earnings in typical labor force surveys. ELMPS 2018 also provided more detailed information on health, gender role attitudes, food security, hazardous work, community infrastructure and the cost of housing. It incorporated specific questions on vulnerability, coping strategies and access to social safety net programs. (Krafft, C, Assaad, R., and Rahman, K .,2019) In addition to the survey’s panel design, which permits the study of various phenomena over time, the survey also contains a large number of retrospective questions about the timing of major life events such as education, residential mobility, jobs, marriage and fertility. The survey provides detailed information about place of birth and subsequent residence, as well information about schools and colleges attended at various stages of an individual’s trajectory, which permit the individual records to be linked to information from other data sources about the geographic context in which the individual lived and the educational institutions s/he attended. The data may be accessed through the ERF Data Portal: http://www.erfdataportal.com/index.php/catalog/157