Abstract:
It is quite challenging to operationalize the notion of job quality for wage and salary employment, and in turn 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 of 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 workplace into several composite indices of job quality. The developed indices are used to identify the workers- and enterprise-specific determinants of job quality. The results of this paper confirm the profile of workers with bad jobs that emerged in 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, and are seldom in Rural Upper Egypt.
