Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: To face up to the COVID-19 pandemic, firms closed their doors and global value chains that connected countries and economies were disrupted.The supply of goods and services contracted, resulting in a comparable contraction in demand for them.Demand for labour, which is derived from demand for goods and services, subsequently dropped.This applied to national labour in domestic labour markets and globally to migrant labour in countries of destination.Since the 1970s, international labour migration performs two main functions in the Egyptian economy.It is an external outlet for the growing Egyptian labour force, which reduces pressures on the domestic labour market.It also is a source of financial remittances in hard currencies.In turn, these remittances carry out two functions.They help families that receive them meet their livelihood needs.This first function of remittances acquired increasing significance over the years and particularly since 2016 after the $12 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) aimed at helping reduce the budget deficit, which meant large cuts in public expenditures and rising poverty rates.The second function of remittances is their contribution to the balance on current accounts, which closes the gap resulting from the chronic deficit in the Egyptian balance of trade.In the last five decades, tens of millions of Egyptian migrant workers left for employment abroad for periods averaging six years and returned to their country.Their main destinations were countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Libya and Jordan.Europe became a minor destination for Egyptian migrant workers in the last 30 years.Egyptian migration to North America and Australia was of the settlement type.In the GCC countries, the pandemic coincided with the collapse in oil prices and consequently in oil revenues, which are the main determinant of their demand for migrant labour.The drop in this demand was thus magnified.It is unknown how many, but most certainly millions of workers either lost their jobs and returned to their countries of origin, or did not, and experienced wage cuts or delays in payments (Abella, 2020).Egyptian migrants were among these millions.The combined impact of the pandemic and of the drop in oil prices on Egyptian migrant workers extended to Jordan, their second destination at present behind Saudi Arabia.The impact on Jordan originates first in the public health measures it government adopted, and second in the consequences of the economic situation in the GCC economies for the Jordanian economy.These consequences are transmitted through both
Source: International Migration
DOI: 10.1111/imig.12818
Author: Ibrahim Awad
Institution: American University in Cairo
Language: English
Topic: Migration and Labor Dynamics
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3132813247