Social assistance and workers' long-term well-being in Egypt

Abstract

<abstract> <p>Does social assistance tailored to augmenting workers' budgets or nurturing their human capital improve workers' lot several years down the road? In Egypt, how have the recipients fared compared to non-recipients, and has the financial versus in-kind form of assistance mattered? We contribute to existing welfare-economic literature by examining the impacts of several complementary social assistance programs on individuals' long-term welfare using Egyptian microdata. Multinomial logistic regression applied to the 2018 wave of the Labor Market Panel Survey, supplemented with evidence from the 2012 wave, shed light on the impacts of public-funded vocational training, health insurance and financial support on households' precariousness of living. Ex-beneficiaries of public-funded vocational training and health insurance are found to reach a less precarious state in terms of better food security and higher job satisfaction than non-beneficiaries. By contrast, recipients of financial assistance are not necessarily better off in the long term than non-recipients. Human capital investments thus appear to have lasting positive impacts on the well-being of workers and their families, while financial transfers have fleeting immediate effects, partly by design, and perhaps because they crowd out private investments or induce behavioral changes due to the associated eligibility criteria and endowment effects.</p> </abstract>