A new paper by Professor Ragui Assaad, "School-to-Work Transitions for Egypt's Youth," published in Open Access Government, examines the structural reforms in Egypt that have made the school-to-work transition for Egyptian youth more difficult and less equal. 

Egypt has adopted a series of structural reforms since the 1990s designed to curb the size of the public sector and place the economy on a market-oriented trajectory. While these reforms succeeded in shrinking the size of the public workforce from 39% of total employment in 1998 to 26% in 2018, they failed to ignite job creation in the private sector. 

The failure of those structural reforms has led to an increasingly difficult and unequal school-to-work transition for Egyptian youth over the past three decades. Educated youth are increasingly unable to translate their education credentials into the middle-class jobs that their older counterparts could get with similar levels of education.

By analyzing the school-to-work transitions of three cohorts of youth in Egypt, Assaad and his co-author demonstrate how such shifts have changed for educated young men and women over time.