Job Quality Among the Non-Wage Workers in the Agriculture and Non-Agricultural Sectors in Egypt

It is quite challenging to operationalize the notion of job quality for wage and salary employment, and even more challenging to devise a measure of job quality for non-wage workers. This paper takes up this challenge and attempts to provide a measure for job quality among the self-employed and unpaid family workers in Egypt. We combine estimated earnings with information on skill acquisition, access to social security, regularity of employment, work hours and nature of the workplace into an index of job quality for each of the agriculture and the non-agriculture sectors. The developed indices are used to identify workers and enterprise-specific determinants of job quality. The results of this paper confirm the profile of workers with bad jobs that emerged from previous studies. Married men in the middle of their life cycle get the good jobs, but not married women. Also, the results show that higher quality non-wage, non-agricultural jobs are more often available in formally registered enterprises, in the manufacturing economic activity, in enterprises with some capital and are seldom in Rural Upper Egypt. While in the agriculture sector, high quality jobs are more likely to be available in enterprises that have some capital and in those working in the farm related activities.