Using Systems Analysis to Forecast Labor Force Participation by Age, Sex, and Educational Attainment in Egypt to 2051

Egypt population size has rapidly increased during the past decades to about 87 million inhabitants in 2014. Egypt will only be able to cope with its population-development challenges if it manages to significantly advance its economic development and slow population growth, where an emphasis on human capital formation (education) is likely to be a key factor. The working-age population (15-64) represents about 64% of the total population. However, only 50% of this age-group is engaged in the labor force; and more than 20% is illiterate, this percentage is even higher among women of working age (30%), which explains their low participation in the formal labor force: only 24%. This paper aims to forecast labor force in Egypt not only by age, sex but also by level of educational attainment, considering education as an important element to enhance labor force participation regardless of its size. Taking into account the continued population growth, the demographic window of opportunity will be flat and long for Egypt, this paper tries to answer the question regarding the ability to “catch it” and benefit from having a large young labor force. This paper is an extension of the work done by Goujon et al. (2007) on human capital (multistate) projections to 2051 in which we developed projections of the Egyptian population by sex, age, and level of educational attainment (including the provincial level). In the presentation we combine these with future scenarios on the rates of participation of the labor force by age, sex, and level of educational attainment at the national level. A better educated even if growing labor force is likely to be able to lessen some of the expected economic consequences of population growth