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‘Job opportunities for the youth’: Competing and overlapping discourses on youth unemployment and work informality in Egypt
Abstract
Employment informality, or employment without access to work contracts and social
insurance, is the norm for Egypt’s working youth, including educated youth. Despite the
policy focus on youth as a demographic group, particularly after the country’s recent
political developments, informality and precariousness remain largely absent from
the policy discourse in Egypt. Youth unemployment rates continue to be the main
yardstick for youth welfare in the country. Drawing on Bacchi’s ‘What is the Problem
Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, the analysis in this article seeks to elucidate the
implicit assumptions in this policy approach. The article juxtaposes the policy discourse
on youth unemployment and informality to that of interviewed educated youth working
informally. The two discourses overlap in assigning the state a central role in providing
jobs in the public service for youth and in marginalizing the potential to address issues
of employment precariousness outside such jobs. They are in discord, however, when
young people articulate strong feelings of injustice when these prized jobs are not made
available
... Selama ini sektor informal identik dengan sumber daya terbatas, seperti pendidikan rendah, kurang terampil, peralatan sederhana, upah rendah dan lain sebagainya. Namun, saat ini ada kecenderungan sektor informal mulai diminati oleh tenaga kerja terdidik (Barsoum, 2016). Gejala ini secara praktis dapat menunjukkan dua hal. ...
... Pemerintah Mesir mampu meningkatkan jumlah penduduk yang bersekolah tinggi, namun tidak mampu menyediakan lapangan kerja layak. Akibatnya, jumlah pekerja terdidik yang terlibat di sektor informal mengalami peningkatan (Barsoum, 2016). Kondisi ini tidak jauh berbeda dengan Indonesia. ...
... Maka dari itu, pilihan yang paling rasional adalah pulang kampung atau melakukan pekerjaan informal di perkotaan. 3) Aspek peralatan, sebelum masa pandemi, telah banyak literatur yang menyebutkan bahwa sektor informal saat ini cenderung dilakukan oleh tenaga kerja terdidik bahkan berpendidikan tinggi (sarjana) (Barsoum, 2016;Wulantari & Armansyah, 2018;Armansyah, 2019;Armansyah & Taufik, 2020). Saat ada pandemi, para pekerja maupun pelaku usaha informal ini melakukan adaptasi dengan memanfaatkan peralatan teknologi untuk menjalankan usahanya, yakni berbasis digital. ...
... This finding shows that there is a tendency for the informal sector in Palembang City to be entered by educated workers. This finding is relevant to the results in Egypt [16], which shows that most educated workers start doing informal work. Likewise, which reveals that the informal sector in Palembang City is mostly carried out by educated workers [17]. ...
... Likewise, which reveals that the informal sector in Palembang City is mostly carried out by educated workers [17]. The increase in educated workers in the informal sector is caused by limited decent work opportunities that are not proportional to the number of higher education graduates [16]. In addition, coupled with the complexity of entry requirements into the formal sector, not all job seekers are able to compete and meet the qualifications expected by job providers. ...
... Reflecting this, there now exists an extensive body of literature, from varied disciplines, examining informal economy phenomena. This includes work in economics (Johnson et al, 2000), management (Godfrey, 2015;Webb, 2009) and sociology (Barsoum, 2015;Samson, 2016). Across these disciplines, the subject of motivations for informality has now received significant attention (see for example Schenider and Williams, 2013;Snyder, 2004;Webb et al 2009;. ...
... How governments can best tackle informal economic activity is the subject of increasing attention (see for example Barsoum, 2015;Mitrus, 2014;Williams and Horodnic, 2016). Williams (2014) provides a useful conceptual framework for classifying available policy measures for tackling the informal economy, identifying five potential overarching policy choices available to governments. ...
To explain the prevalence and persistence of informal economic activity globally, scholars have recently advanced an institutional incongruence perspective. Institutional incongruence exists where there is a misalignment between what is considered legitimate by a society’s formal institutions (e.g. its laws and regulations) and its informal institutions (e.g. norms, values and beliefs). Reporting findings from a series of qualitative focus groups in Bulgaria, Croatia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, this article explores relationships between such institutional incongruence and informal economic activity. In particular, it sheds light on how informality and institutional incongruence are experienced by individuals in South-East Europe. It furthermore provides insights on the causes of such incongruence, and how it can lead to informal economic activity. Finally, it reports on individuals’ perceptions towards different measures to tackle institutional incongruence and informal economic activity, with implications for policymakers in South-East Europe and more widely.
... Penggunaan pendekatan WPR untuk analisis kebijakan pengelolaan sampah ini dilakukan karena kebijakan pengelolaan sampah di Kota Samarinda sudah ada dan diimplementasikan sejak 2011 tetapi masih menyisakan persoalan di lapangan. Beberapa penulis telah menggunakan pendekatan ini untuk menganalisis isu kebijakan yang beragam, seperti Murray dan Powel (2009), Payne (2014, Barsoum (2015, serta Bacchi (2015 sendiri.Penggunaan pendekatan ini dimaksudkan untuk melihat isu utama atau permasalahan yang ditampilkan dan ingin dipecahkan dalamsuatu kebijakan serta alasan yang mendasarinya. Karena dari formulasi permasalahan kebijakan akan berimplikasi terhadap efektivitas implementasi kebijakan nantinya apakah bisa menjangkau atau menjawab permasalahan yang ada. ...
... Ketiga, Barsoum (2015) yang menganalisis kebijakan ketenagakerjaan untuk kaum muda di Mesir. Studi ini menguraikan asumsi implisit (pertanyaan 2) dalam pendekatan kebijakan tersebut. ...
This study emphasizes on document critical analysis on waste management policy in Samarinda Municipality, namely Municipality Regulation # 2 / 2011. Drawing on Bacchi’s WPR (What is the problem represented to be?) approach to policy analysis, this study reveals that management and citizen obedience are presented as two main issues in the policy to improve the quality of public and environmental health. On the management issue, the waste management policy is not effective to tackle the problem. It is because of poor capacity in transporting the waste, while the volume of waste production is higher than the transported one. Consequently,
the uncollected waste in the city prevents the local government’s effort to create a clean and healthy environment. Then on the obedience issue, this policy sets sanctions for anyone who breaks the regulation. Unfortunately, this policy does not set public education as an important issue to improve citizens’ behaviour. Public education should be a bottom-up approach to support the effort to create a clean and healthy city.
Kajian ini melakukan analisis kritis terhadap dokumen kebijakan pengelolaan sampah di Kota Samarinda, yaitu Perda No. 2 / 2011. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan WPR (What is the problem represented to be?) yang diperkenalkan oleh Bacchi, kajian ini mengungkapkan bahwa persoalan manajemen dan kepatuhan warga menjadi isu utama yang ditampilkan dalam kebijakan tersebut sebagai upaya untuk meningkatkan kualitas kesehatan masyarakat dan lingkungan. Dari sisi manajemen, kebijakan pengelolaan sampah di Kota Samarinda tidak berjalan efektif untuk menjawab persoalan. Hal ini terbukti dengan masih rendahnya kapasitas pengangkutan sampah dibandingkan dengan volume produksi sampah sehingga sebagian sampah tidak terangkut. Sisa sampah ini menjadikan upaya menciptakan lingkungan yang bersih dan sehat tidak terwujud. Kemudian dari sisi kepatuhan, kebijakan ini mengatur sanksi terhadap masyarakat yang melanggar Perda. Namun, kebijakan ini tidak menyentuh edukasi publik sebagai isu penting untuk mengubah perilaku masyarakat. Edukasi publik seharusnya bisa dijadikan sebagai pendekatan bottom-up untuk mendukung upaya pemerintah kota menciptakan lingkungan yang bersih dan sehat.
... Berdasarkan kedua kondisi tersebut, Sulistyo Rini (2013) menjelaskan bahwa di wilayah perkotaan pekerjaan formal menuntut kualifikasi pendidikan yang memadai dengan persaingan yang tinggi sehingga membuat mereka yang pada awalnya ingin bekerja di sektor formal pada akhirnya masuk ke sektor informal. Kajian lain yang menemukan fenomena serupa lainnya menjelaskan banyaknya tenaga kerja terdidik memilih masuk ke dalam pekerjaan sektor informal karena ketidakmampuan pemerintah dalam menyiapkan lapangan pekerjaan yang layak bagi tenaga kerja terdidik (Barsoum, 2016). ...
Tujuan dari kajian ini adalah untuk menganalisis bagaimana gambaran karakteristik perempuan bekerja serta mengetahui hubungan karakteristik sosial, ekonomi, dan demografi terhadap partisipasi kerja perempuan di sektor informal. Lokasi penelitian ini berada di daerah pinggiran kota Yogyakarta yakni di Dusun Tambakbayan mengingat berbagai penelitian terdahulu belum berfokus pada wilayah peri-peri. Di Dusun ini kebanyakan perempuan ikut membantu memperoleh pendapatan dengan bekerja. Pada penelitian ini data dikumpulkan secara langsung dari responden dengan wawancara terhadap seluruh perempuan bekerja dengan kuesioner terstruktur dengan metode sensus atau cacah lengkap. Adapun metode analisis yang digunakan adalah metode kuantitatif dengan analisis deskriptif yakni analisis univariat dengan tabel frekuensi dan analisis bivariat (Uji Chi-Square). Berdasarkan analisis univariat diketatahui bahwa mayoritas perempuan bekerja di Dusun Tambakbayan bekerja di sektor informal, berumur relatif tua, pernah menikah, memiliki pendidikan minimal sekolah menengah atas, memiliki kepala keluarga yang tidak bekerja pada sektor informal, serta memiliki ukuran keluarga yang cenderung besar. Selain itu, berdasarkan hubungan karakteristik sosial, ekonomi, dan demografi dengan Uji Chi-Square terhadap status sektor pekerjaan yang dimiliki diketahui bahwa terdapat tiga variabel yang signifikan berpengaruh, yakni umur, status perkawinan, dan status pekerjaan kepala keluarga. Oleh karena itu, sebagai sektor penampung kelebihan pekerja pemerintah juga harus dapat menjamin hak-hak pekerja informal melalui pemberian fasilitas atau menghapuskan biaya dan prosedur perizinan di sektor informal.
... Despite the large gender disparity in the region in labour force participation, Barsoum (2017) argues that the term 'youth' generally connotes with male youth. Women find themselves mainly on the two ends of the ALMP spectrum, either in traditional needlework training programmes for uneducated young women or in campus-based job placement programmes (Barsoum 2016a(Barsoum , 2017. Despite the large share of women among the unemployed, they remain the least targeted population. ...
... This is not to discount the large body of literature seeking to provide an analytical understanding of the issue of informality, such as Chen's (2005) conceptualization of informality. Two key lines of argument have been repeatedly identified in this body of research (Barsoum, 2016a). The first is the voluntarist legalist argument, which conceptualizes informality as a choice to avoid paying taxes and other associated cumbersome costs (De Soto, 1989;Van Ginneken, 2003;and Maloney, 2004). ...
In 2019, the Government of Egypt issued a new legal framework for its social insurance system. Aside from providing a unified scheme covering different groups of workers, the new regulation allowed for systemic and parametric reforms that were aimed in large part at addressing the challenge of workers’ low enrolment in social insurance, with an emphasis on informal workers. The reforms reduced the rate of contributions paid by employees and employers, increased the penalties for employers who do not register their workers, and improved the benefits structure. The law also specified provisions to facilitate the enrolment of informal workers by offering to cover the employer’s share of their contributions. However, the law limited such improved access to nine specific categories of informal workers, a decision that fails to recognize the diversity of informal forms of work. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of contributors to the previous system, this article argues that structural barriers pertaining to the large numbers of low‐earners and informal enterprises in the economy will likely hinder the expansion of system enrolment despite the legal reforms.
... youth waste pickers, is high because they face challenges such as being exposed to poor working conditions, absence of social security and health benefit schemes and poor medical facilities. Youths entering the labour market are particularly disadvantaged (Barsoum 2016). Youth performance in the labour market indicates that they tend to fare worse than adults in most outcomes (Cruces et al 2012). ...
Across the globe, the livelihood of millions of people relies on the recovery and sale of valuable materials previously discarded as waste. In developed countries, this is mainly incorporated into the official recycling and resources recovery sector, while in developing countries the informal waste picking activities often make a major contribution. Waste picking provides important opportunities to people who have few or no marketable skills and education and no alternative sources of income to survive. However, waste pickers’ living conditions remain deplorable, and their working conditions continue to be dangerous due to hazardous waste. Given the social, economic, and environmental benefits waste pickers bring, and particularly their contribution to circular economy goals in developing nations, the role of waste pickers has mostly been undervalued on the development agenda. This paper examines the literature on waste pickers around the world, their working and living conditions, and explores the issue of formalisation. A total of 45 papers published from 1994 to 2022 were reviewed, covering case studies on waste pickers from 27 different countries. We analyse the content of these papers based on a list of key themes: poverty, health, stigma, environmental factors, informality, and formalisation. We find that the informal status of waste pickers, and the question of them being formalised into a Municipal Solid Waste Management sector is discussed extensively in the literature, and we delve deeper into this theme. Formalisation can potentially bring considerable improvement to the lives of waste pickers, including legal recognition, safe working conditions and fair bargaining mechanisms. In practice however, we find that formalisation policies take significantly different forms from one country to another and often fail to provide these benefits.
... Fleksibelitas waktu kerja menjadikan sektor informal lebih mudah dilakukan dan tidak terikat aturan yang kaku. Saat ini terdapat kecenderungan sektor informal diminati oleh tenaga kerja terdidik (Barsoum, 2016). ...
Pelaku usaha informal dianggap paling rentan terkena dampak Covid-19, sebab bersifat subsisten dan memiliki sumber daya terbatas. Penelitian ini bertujuan menjelaskan dampak sosial ekonomi Covid-19 terhadap pelaku usaha informal offline dan online di Kota Palembang. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan teknik pengumpulan data wawancara mendalam, observasi dan dokumentasi. Wawancara mendalam dilakukan pada 12 informan, dengan kriteria: 1) Merupakan pelaku usaha informal offline dan online ; 2) Telah menjalankan usaha minimal 1 tahun; dan 3) Berdomisili di Kota Palembang. Analisis data menggunakan Teknik Miles dan Huberman yang meliputi tahapan reduction, display, dan conclusion. Teknik uji keabsahan data menggunakan derajat kredibilitas, yang terdiri dari triangulasi (waktu), peningkatan ketekunan, perpanjangan pengamatan, dan diskusi teman sejawat. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa Covid-19 memberikan dampak pada kondisi sosial ekonomi pelaku usaha informal offline dan online . Dampak tersebut ditandai oleh terjadinya penurunan tingkat pendapatan lebih dari 50 persen, penurunan kemampuan menabung dan berinvestasi, serta terganggunya aktivitas pendidikan bagi pelaku usaha informal yang sedang berstatus sekolah/kuliah, seperti kesulitan biaya dan manajemen waktu.
... 2. Literature review 2.1 The socio-economic characteristics of the youth owned small business in Nigeria Youths are eager to attain independence and earn a living by themselves and even support their family. After their education, they either seek gainful employment or set up entrepreneurial ventures (Barsoum, 2016;Arend, 2019). Entering into the business world is a daunting task for youths who are up against fierce competition from established players in their domain. ...
Purpose
The birth and survival rate of youth-owned businesses has been a major concern for policymakers, industry and academics alike. Learning and innovation play important roles and more critical is the mediating factors and how it impacts the enterprise competitiveness of youth-owned businesses and hence worth studying. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of mediating factors such as government support, informal network society and external knowledge infrastructure on learning and innovation in youth-owned small businesses in Lagos, Nigeria, from a cross-sectional perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Leveraging the sectoral system of innovation theory, we use a primary research method and data obtained from a structured questionnaire administered among a sample of 1,000 registered youth-owned small businesses in Lagos, while 30 in-depth interviews were also conducted. The exploratory factor analysis was used for data examination.
Findings
The findings show that even though government support, informal network society and external knowledge all have a positive relationship with learning and innovation in youth-owned small businesses, government support has the most impactful impact. The informal network society via a trade association, professional network and social media are also critical in knowledge transfer in youth-owned businesses.
Originality/value
The significance of learning and innovation is more important as many small businesses do not have the privilege of standard human resource management (HRM) systems. This paper looks at the mediating factors affecting the introduction of innovative practices in youth-owned and managed small businesses and how productivity is enabled in a developing county context.
... Addressing youth unemployment is an issue that tops public policy discourses and policymakers' pronouncements in Egypt. With a long history of the government guaranteeing employment in the public sector for those who achieve a threshold level of education, there is an expectation among middle class youth and those aspiring to be in the middle class by virtue of their educational attainment that solving their employment problem is a government responsibility (Barsoum 2016). Being relegated to the informal economy in precarious and unstable jobs is perceived by them with a deep sense of injustice (Ibid.). ...
... However, because their educational background and skills are relatively low, they are unable to compete, and are forced to do work in the informal sector. Along with the development of the informal sector not only carried out by workers who are not in school, in Egypt, the informal sector is also carried out by highly educated workers as a stepping stone and fill the time to get the expected work [4]. ...
... Nowadays, the informal sector has grown with highly educated informal workers similar to that of (Barsoum, 2016), and Brazil (Williams & Youssef, 2015). However, this condition tends to have some negative effects on educated informal workers, as most often, they are faced with the challenges of getting a job which makes them to switch to the informal sector in a bid to make ends needs (Williams & Youssef, 2015). ...
The equal gender employment opportunity rights has not only significantly heightened women's employment interest but also their dilemma in balancing their employment and home-making roles. In fact, the dilemma has hampered the smooth running of their employment. This study sought to understand the nature of constraints women workers in the city of Palembang face when running their businesses. Primary data was gathered from a field survey of 300 women working in Palembang's informal sectors, and focus interviews of 6 main women informants in the informal sectors and 4 key informants selected from the labor sector agency. Descriptive statistics techniques were utilized to process the data obtained. The results of the study and analysis revealed that 66 percent of women workers in the informal sector were more interested in working specifically as traders / entrepreneurs; that 27 percent of their problems were related to lack of capital, 25 percent to weather, 13 percent families, 7 percent time, 4 percent education, 1 percent regulation, and the remaining 23 percent other types of obstacles. Lack of capital seemed to be the most dominant constraint but the women were hopeful of getting help from the government as evidenced by the fact that 96 percent of the women in Palembang's informal sector responded positively to the assistance offered by the government.
... The informal sector is considered not to have contributed to the development because it is not taxed or giving other contributions. In the past, the informal sector was said to be lost in line with the progress of development in an area, but in fact the informal sector remained and increasingly varied, and many of the workers came from higher educational background (high school and above) (Sychareun et al., 2016) and (Barsoum, 2016) ...
... L. Bacchi, 2009, p. 19). Some authors apply several questions only to analyze policies in various fields, such as Alexander & Coveney (2013), Bastian & Coveney (2013), Payne (2014), Barsoum (2015), C. Bacchi (2015), Wahyudi (2016), and so on. Their works explore the contribution of WPR approach, which is considered as post-structural policy analysis, to the knowledge development in several policy analysis discourses. ...
This paper aims to discuss problematizations of discretion issue in the Administration Law 2014. Discretion is one of some discussed issues in the Administration Law which provides a legal guidance for bureaucrats to conduct their jobs. Drawing on Bacchi’s WPR (What is problem represented to be?) approach to policy analysis, this paper interrogates what ‘problem(s)’ is(are) produced in the policy document, what presuppositions are used as arguments to support the ‘problems’, what left unproblematic issue is absence in the policy problematizations, and what effects are produced by the ‘problem’ representation. The paper finds out that rules and procedures are the key concepts which assumed as policy ‘problems’ regarding to discretion issue. Neglecting the certain rules and procedures will be considered as doing illegal action. Only public managers have the discretionary power, or managerial discretion, but in limited room because of upper manager’s intervention. However, this discretion policy remains an inefficient and rigid process in facing certain situation because, in exercising discretion, they have to obey certain rules and procedures. In addition, staffs do not have discretionary authority within their jobs although they might also face some certain situation which needs to make decisions.
... As Bacchi (2009, p. 19) argues that researchers need to subject their own problem representations to the WPR analysis. Third, Barsoum (2015) uses WPR approach to elucidate implicit assumptions in employment informality of youth worker in Egypt. Through a critical analysis of a policy Public Policy and Administration Research www.iiste.org ...
This article analyses organizational reform policy at National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA) in Indonesia. Drawing on Bacchi’s WPR approach to policy analysis, this article aims to interrogate represented problem that is supposed to address. This study finds out that innovation is the most important issue that the policy attempts to address. The policy also responds bureaucratic problem in this country that is poor in creating breakthroughs. Although this organizational reform succeeds to reduce the structure but it also creates a new division of innovation which has tasks to endorse and promote innovation practices. Such tasks are actually available to be embedded in the research division.
Keywords: problematizations, organizational reform, NIPA, Indonesia
Despite its political and strategic importance, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been largely absent from cross-regional comparative treatments of industrial and labor relations. This special issue builds on a rich, multidisciplinary, and methodologically diverse body of research on labor and employment in the MENA, bringing together a collection of cutting-edge work in this field. The goal is to bring the study of the MENA into conversation with international and comparative scholarship on industrial and labor relations and to encourage more systematic inclusion of the MENA in comparative work. Drawing on research on Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel, and the Gulf states, contributors to this special issue advance comparative scholarship on migration, labor market outcomes, worker agency, and the relationship between unions and precarious workers. This introductory essay situates these contributions in the context of three bodies of research in the study of labor in the MENA: resistance and contentious activism, labor market challenges, and migration.
This chapter looks both at the political and economic climates that shape youth opportunities in Amman, Cairo, Tunis and Jerusalem. Current labour markets conditions are unfavorable to Arab youth, who face some of the highest unemployment rates in the world. The gap between adult and youth unemployment is large in the Arab world, with young new entrants to the labour market most affected. Economic privatization policies adopted in the 1970s onwards reduced government jobs, without creating formal stable employment in the private sector to compensate; thus pushing youth to work in the informal sectorthe informal sector with precarious job conditions, leading them to often become dependent on and subordinate to the patriarchal elders in their family units.
Youth unemployment is a major socio‐political issue in the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, active labour market programmes (ALMPs) in support of youth employment remain less prevalent and are generally outside the purview of social policies in the region's countries. This article addresses this inconsistency. The article provides an overview of such programmes and identifies the challenges to their inclusion as a central part of the region's social policy mix. Internationally, the article notes that successful models for the integration of ALMPs into social policies have been part of long‐term reforms targeting inclusive social security systems. This has not been the case in Arab countries where access to contributory social security systems is limited and where labour markets are characterized by large informal economies and a majority of workers are without social protection. Further contributing factors pertain to limited state budgets and a limited knowledge base about the effectiveness of ALMPs in the region.
Active labour market programmes (ALMPs) are at the core of welfare regimes in many countries across the world. This study addressed youth‐focused ALMPs in Egypt, a country with high youth unemployment and a plethora of programmes ostensibly addressing this issue. Building on interviews with implementers, programme documentation and a publically accessible inventory of programmes in Egypt, the analysis locates ALMPs within the country's overall welfare system and the politics of programme targeting, design, governance and implementation modalities. The legacy of state ‘protective’ policies and the fragmented multiplicity of players within the field constrain the effectiveness and outreach of these programmes. Analysis of implementation modalities also shows that there is a pervasive lack of programme coordination, activity documentation, management for results, and pathways to achieving sustainability and programme institutionalisation.
Key Practitioner Message: • Egypt's fragmented ALMPs field must be integrated and coordinated within the country's broader welfare system • Programme documentation, management of results, rigorous evaluation and sustainability plans must be seriously addressed
It is well-established that Arab labor markets share certain common characteristics, including an oversized public sector, high youth unemployment, weak private sectors, rapidly growing but highly distorted educational attainment, and low and stagnant female labor force participation. I argue in this paper that all of these features can be explained by the deep and persistent dualism that characterizes Arab labor markets that resulted from the use of labor markets by Arab regimes as tool of political appeasement in the context of “authoritarian bargain” social contracts. Even as fiscal crises have long destabilized these arrangements in most non-oil Arab countries, culminating in the dramatic political upheavals of the Arab Spring, I argue that the enduring legacy of dualism will continue to strongly shape the production and deployment of human capital in Arab economies for some time.
JEL classification
I25, J21, J24, J31, J45, O53, P52
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it seeks to voice the concerns of educated youth in Egypt as they describe their work options and preferences. Second, it seeks to highlight the gravity of the policy gap in addressing work informality, drawing on some of the international experience in this field.
Design/methodology/approach
– Qualitative research in the form of in-depth interviews, desk-review of policies, and descriptive statistical analysis of a recent national survey of labour in Egypt.
Findings
– A large proportion of educated youth work within the realm of informality and there is a clear policy gap in addressing this issue. Contrary to what would be expected, young people value access to social security and work stability. They face systemic hurdles related to access to such benefits. Because of the legacy of guaranteed government hiring of the educated in Egypt, young people express a great appreciation of work in the government, for virtually being the only employer offering job stability and social security in the labour market.
Research limitations/implications
– This paper addresses a gap in the literature on youth employment in Egypt, where there is a dearth of research focusing on the lived experience of employment precariousness. The majority of studies in this field relies on statistics with little qualitative research voicing the views of this group.
Practical implications
– Reforms are more urgent than timely to extend social security and other measures of social protection to workers within the informal economy.
Originality/value
– The paper builds on primary data and provides insights about the way educated youth perceive their working conditions and options. The paper also provides a discussion of the social security system in Egypt, its coverage, and possible reform approaches.
Introduction: This Quick Note provides an overview of the World Bank report Striving for Better Jobs: the Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa 2 . The report was completed as a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests swept across the Arab world. Millions of young people were chanting "dignity" and "social justice" in the region, underlining deep-seated feelings of exclusion and inequality of opportunities. Demanding democracy, human rights, and better governance, young Arabs were also striving to realize their economic aspirations in a region rich in human and physical capital. However, while there has been economic growth for a number of years in MENA countries, this has not led to an adequate number of good jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. Levels and Trends of Informality in MENA: The report looks at informality through a human development angle, focusing on informal employment. Informality is a complex phenomenon, comprising unpaid workers, wage and self employed workers without social security or health insurance, small or micro-firms operating outside regulations and large registered firms that partially evade corporate taxes and social security contributions. Three indices are commonly used to measure informality: (i) the Schneider Index, which estimates the share of production not declared to tax and regulatory authorities; (ii) the prevalence of self-employment, and (iii) the share of employed workers without social security coverage. Defining 1 The authors are staff of Middle East and North Africa Human Development Department (MNSHD), The World Bank. 2 To be available shortly at Worldbank.org/MENA.
http://www.ilo.org/employment/areas/youth-employment/work-for-youth/publications/national-reports/WCMS_247596/lang--en/index.htm
The term ‘precariat’—a precarious proletariat—has achieved considerable prominence in recent years and is probably now ripe for critical deconstruction. It also needs to be situated in terms of a genealogy that includes the marginality debates of the 1960s, the later informal sector problematic and the ‘social exclusion’ optic that became dominant in the 1980s. I will argue that the concept is highly questionable both as an adequate sociology of work in the North and insofar as it elides the experience of the South in an openly Eurocentric manner. In terms of political discourse I think we should avoid the language of ‘dangerous class’, as deployed by Guy Standing to situate workers politically in the policy world as though frightening the ruling classes was a strategy for transformation.
For much of the previous century, the informal sector was largely represented as a residue of a previous mode of production confined to marginal populations and gradually disappearing due to the inevitable and natural shift towards the formal economy across the globe. Over the past quarter of a century, however, articles published in Work, Employment and Society have been at the forefront of re-reading the informal sector. This article reveals how this body of literature has shown informal economic activities to be a persistent and ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape, mapped the complex and variable dynamics of formal and informal work in different populations, transcended simplistic universal structure/agency explanations for the persistence of informal work by developing context-bound understandings, and challenged the formal/informal dichotomy which represents the formal and informal sectors as separate hostile worlds. The article concludes by highlighting some possible future directions for research on this topic.
This article has two main aims. The first is to problematize the dominant view of the informal economy as a sort of separate economy, related primarily to (immigrant) small business and distinct from the so-called formal economy, which for the most part encompasses big companies as well as state economic activities. In contrast, the present article assumes that all economic actors are increasingly ready to adopt informal economic strategies to secure their economical survival. In line with this assumption, the second aim of the article is to contribute to our knowledge of the causes of, as well as the actors within, the current informalization trends that characterize Western economies. The article concludes that the informalization of contemporary advanced economies in general terms is a result of a structural conflict between new economic trends and old regulatory frameworks. These frameworks, with their focus on decommodification, have become too restrictive for new forms of capital accumulation, with their focus on flexible adaptation, which include an increasing demand for the re-commodification of labour. The conflict emerges and intensifies, among other reasons, because of the radically different internal operational logics, agendas and priorities that characterize these two social processes.
Informal sector workers constitute a large and increasing part of the labour force in most developing countries. Many of them are not able or willing to contribute a significant percentage of their incomes to finance formal sector social insurance benefits that do not meet their priority needs. Therefore, informal sector workers themselves need to (and have) set up health and other social insurance schemes that better meet their needs and contributory capacity. In addition, special social assistance schemes are necessary to protect the most vulnerable groups outside the labour force. This article also assesses some key implications of these developments for formal social insurance schemes.
This book illuminates, commemorates, and builds upon Bacchi?s ?WPR? approach. It outlines the trajectory of the development of the ?WPR? approach from Bacchi?s early engagements with feminist thinking, as an academic in scholarly environments which were often the preserve of men, towards the theoretical sophistication of an approach which requires an ongoing critical assessment of assumptions about the social world, social ?problems?, policy agendas deemed to respond to those ?problems?, and the researcher?s positioning.
This book illuminates, commemorates, and builds upon Bacchis WPR approach. It outlines the trajectory of the development of the WPR approach from Bacchis early engagements with feminist thinking, as an academic in scholarly environments which were often the preserve of men, towards the theoretical sophistication of an approach which requires an ongoing critical assessment of assumptions about the social world, social problems, policy agendas deemed to respond to those problems, and the researchers positioning.
This book illuminates, commemorates, and builds upon Bacchis WPR approach. It outlines the trajectory of the development of the WPR approach from Bacchis early engagements with feminist thinking, as an academic in scholarly environments which were often the preserve of men, towards the theoretical sophistication of an approach which requires an ongoing critical assessment of assumptions about the social world, social problems, policy agendas deemed to respond to those problems, and the researchers positioning.
The main aim of this volume is to initiate a policy dialogue on how to deal with this phenomenon. It makes three main contributions to the policy debate. First, it presents comparable data on the evolution of informal employment and its most significant components for a wide array of countries and over time. Second, it discusses what determines informal employment, its persistence over time, and its gender dimension. It also considers the strategies of individual workers in seeking to increase their earnings within informal employment and across the divide between informal and formal employment. Third, it argues for a three-pronged strategy better to deal with informal employment and its consequences.
This article was written for scholars who do not engage in qualitative research and/or who are not familiar with its methods and epistemologies. It focuses on naturalistic qualitative research with families. An overview of the goals and procedures of qualitative research is first presented. This is followed by a discussion of the linkages between epistemologies and methodology. Then, possible guidelines involved in the several steps of the evaluation process of qualitative family papers are reviewed. This is complemented by an overview of problems frequently encountered both by reviewers and by authors of such papers. The variety of qualitative epistemologies and methods in family research is highlighted, even though our focus is limited to epistemologies leading to naturalistic fieldwork.
Neoliberalism, stemming from the musings of the Mont Pelerin Society after the Second World War, meant a model of liberalization, commodification, individualism, the privatization of social policy as well as production, and – least appreciated – the systematic dismantling of institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity. From the late 1970s onwards, it meant the painful construction of a global market system, in which the globalization era was the disembedded phase of the Global Transformation, analogous to a similar phase in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. In both cases, the disembedded phase was dominated by financial capital, generating chronic insecurities and inequalities. But whereas Polanyi was analysing the construction of national markets, the Global Transformation is about the painful construction of a global market system.
One consequence has been the emergence of a global class structure superimposed on national structures. In order to move towards a re-embedded phase, it is essential to understand the character of the class fragmentation, and to conceptualize the emerging mass class-in-the-making, the precariat. This is a controversial concept, largely because traditional Marxists dispute its class character. However, it is analytically valuable to differentiate it, since it has distinctive relations of production, relations of distribution and relations to the state. It is still a class-in-the-making rather than a class-for-itself. But it is the new dangerous class because it is a force for transformation, rejecting both labourist social democracy and neoliberalism. It has a distinctive consciousness, although it is this that holds it back from being sufficiently a class-for-itself. It is still divided, being at war with itself. However, it has moved out of its primitive rebel phase, and in the city squares around the world is setting a new progressive agenda based on its insecurities and aspirations.
This article examines gender discourses embedded in gender equality policies in the health sector. Gender mainstreaming was first adopted by a number of international and intergovernmental, regional and national actors some time ago, yet there is limited evidence of progress in addressing gender justice in health. Failures in gender equality policies have often been attributed to the lack of gender-disaggregated data, combined with a lack of resources, training and skills. In addition, studies have identified problems originating in the shift from participatory approaches to technocratic solutions, and the persistence of underlying gender relations of power. However, gender equality policies may also contribute to gender discourse in ways which reinforce and perpetuate inequalities between men and women. This article draws on Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis, to explore responses of primary care organisations in England to legislation requiring public sector organisations to tackle gender discrimination and promote equality of opportunity between men and women. The article adopts a critical discourse approach to gender equality documents and suggests that such texts construct women and men as essentially different, reinforcing specific forms of masculinity and male performance and notions of male disadvantage in health systems.
This book offers a novel approach to thinking about public policy and a new, distinctive methodology for analysing policy. It introduces a set of six questions that probe how 'problems' are represented in policies, followed by an undertaking to apply the questions to one's own policy proposals. This form of analysis, it suggests, is crucial to understanding how policy works, how we are governed, and how the practice of policy-making implicitly constitutes us as subjects.
The Arab Spring is still unfolding, as is the direction of change, and outcomes may be different for violent and nonviolent uprisings. This article focuses on three early cases of the Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco – to discuss causes and likely outcomes, gender dynamics, prospects for genuine democratization, and the connection between feminist movements and democratization. A comparative and international perspective highlights similarities and differences across the Arab cases and between the Arab Spring and other ‘democracy waves’.
Poverty, inequality, unemployment, torture and corruption were among the main reasons why millions of Egyptians protested to end 30 years of Mubarak's rule in January 2011. The speed with which the regime has fallen and its fragility surprised the world. This is mainly because of the false image of a stable, prosperous and progressive Egypt propagated by the state, ignoring another Egypt, a poor, suffering and repressed one. The failure to see the latter Egypt led to the fall of the former. The aim of this article is to tell a ‘tale of two Egypts’ by contrasting the experiences and voices of poor Egyptians with the misleading figures reported by the state. The analysis shows how the state was able to provide Egyptians with growth without equity, education without inspiration, employment without security, health services without care and voting without any real impact on political processes.
This paper provides an ethnographic and cultural analysis of the ‘informal sector’ in Morocco. In this age of globalisation, no firm can afford to ignore the vibrant informal sector that makes up the bulk of GDP in many developing economies. And yet, the informal sector is routinely misunderstood and mythologised as ‘pimps, drug dealers, counterfeiters and pirates’, and is particularly despised by the high tech industry. Based on fieldwork, the authors' goal is to examine this dynamic economic phenomenon and to dispel a few myths by providing an ethnographic description of one exemplary case. While the study focuses on the experience of an articulate entrepreneur, who happens to operate in the highly dynamic underground economy in new, used and black market information and communications technologies, it speaks to such themes as entrepreneurship, global products flows, economic relations, and the implications of the informal sector for global flows of goods and services.
This article originated in the study of one Northern Ghanaian group, the Frafras, as migrants to the urban areas of Southern Ghana. It describes the economic activities of the low-income section of the labour force in Accra, the urban sub-proletariat into which the unskilled and illiterate majority of Frafra migrants are drawn.
Price inflation, inadequate wages, and an increasing surplus to the requirements of the urban labour market have led to a high degree of informality in the income-generating activities of the sub-proletariat. Consequently income and expenditure patterns are more complex than is normally allowed for in the economic analysis of poor countries. Government planning and the effective application of economic theory in this sphere has been impeded by the unthinking transfer of western categories to the economic and social structures of African cities. The question to be answered is this: Does the ‘reserve army of urban unemployed and underemployed’ really constitute a passive, exploited majority in cities like Accra, or do their informal economic activities possess some autonomous capacity for generating growth in the incomes of the urban (and rural) poor?
Iran's Islamic Revolution seems to have taken the world by surprise. The Western mass media have subsequently been alarming their readers with warnings of Islamic “revival,” “resurgence,” “rumble,” and “anger.” Strategists and political practitioners have joined in – invariably using the same or more academic-sounding jargon, such as the “arc of trouble” or the “crescent of crisis.” The area referred to stretches from Morocco to Indonesia, where nearly 800 million Muslims live and in which some of the world's most strategic raw materials and real estate are located. The rising attention and the West' alarm are quite understandable and indeed quite justifiable. After all, most of that alleged anger is directed at the West and its local allies and surrogates - the Shah being a case in point. The seizure of the American embassy in Teheran along with some fifty hostages in November 1979 highlighted this deep-seated resentment. But in neighboring Afghanistan another chapter of the Islamic drama is unfolding - this, time in the form of a resistance to the Soviets and their local surrogates. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December of 1979 compounded an already complicated situation. It plunged the world closer to the brink.
Inequality in Profit-Making and Earning CapacitiesPolarization Trends in Service EmploymentTrends Towards Spatial and Organizational PolarizationConclusion
The paper draws on recent evidence––economic, sociological and anthropological––from Latin America to forward a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated microentrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. It offers alternative explanations for many of the characteristics of the sector customarily regarded as evidence of its inferiority.
The current health insurance system in Egypt targets the productive population through an employment-based scheme bounded by a cost ceiling and focusing on curative care. Egypt Social Contract Survey data from 2005 were used to evaluate the impact of the employment-based scheme on health system accessibility and financing. Only 22.8% of the population in the productive age range (19-59 years) benefited from any health insurance scheme. The employment-based scheme covered 39.3% of the working population and was skewed towards urban areas, older people, females and the wealthier. It did not increase service utilization, but reduced out-of-pocket expenditure. Egypt should blend all health insurance schemes and adopt an innovative approach to reach universal coverage.
Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo - - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Marina Welker
El autor estudia los casos de cuatro países en los que la educación está relacionada al mercado de trabajo y que este ha deformado a las escuelas apartándose de su fin primordial que es enseñar y capacitar. Los países son Inglaterra, Japón, Sri Lanka y Kenya. Además hace una valoración de reformas educativas en Cuba y China que han intentado solucionar este escenario.
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