Household food security is an important measure of well-being.

This paper uses a panel data of 347 households in Egypt to measure changes in household consumption between 1997 and 1999 and to identify causes behind the changes.

Despite achieving a significant cost reduction over the past two decades, the absolute cost of food subsidies in Egypt is still high relative to the benefits received by the poor.

Since the transition to democracy, South African public works programs are to involve community participation, and be targeted to the poor and women.

Egyptian labor market is moving from a period of high overall unemployment to one where unemployment is increasingly concentrated among specific groups whose access to the private-sector labor market is limited.

Poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society.

Egypt has a large food subsidy program that has created a relatively effective social safety net, but it has also drained budgetary resources and proved to be poorly targeted toward the poor.

The trend in real agricultural wages in Egypt is described well by an inverted U-shaped curve with a peak around 1985.

This paper presents a profile of poverty in Egypt for 1997.