تأثير جائحة كورونا على البطالة في مصر

Abstract EN

The study aims at examining the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on unemployment rates and thus helping policy makers in controlling the crisis and reducing the negative effects of the pandemic on macroeconomic variables, particularly the level of employment.

To achieve this, the study presents some concepts related to the Coronavirus pandemic, then it analyzes some previous empirical studies that examined the economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic and some other previous epidemics.

The study reviews the employment and unemployment conditions in Egypt during the outbreak of the Coronavirus and uses the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) Model, which is also known as the Bound Testing Approach for Cointegration, to estimate the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on unemployment in Egypt from 2000 to 2018, using the Tuberculosis epidemic as a proxy for this pandemic due to the availability of its time series.

The results indicate that there is a positive significant relationship between the epidemic and unemployment in the short run, which means that the incidence or increase of the disease leads to higher unemployment rates.

This may be due to the illness of some workers, as well as the dismissal of many of them because of the closure of many businesses to prevent the spread of infection, and as a result of the decrease in demand, production and hence employment.

In the long run, the impact of the epidemic becomes insignificant, probably due to controlling the spread of the disease and finding appropriate remedies, which also coincides with the measures taken by the government to mitigate the negative effects of the epidemic on unemployment.