Understanding the sources of job creation and of innovation is key for ensuring sustainable employment, business dynamism and economic growth. Business dynamism, the process of firm creation, selection through exit, and growth, is a key determinant of economic growth and a driver of job creation. The “Business dynamics review of Egypt” contributes directly to the Egyptian government’s reform agenda to enhance private sector competitiveness and create more and better jobs. By strengthening the country’s data infrastructure and analytical capacity, this project also supports Egypt in its ambition to better support evidence-based policy making.
The work presented in this report draws on the OECD’s DynEmp project, a harmonised micro-aggregated database that allows for cross-country analysis of employment and business dynamics. Through this project, Egypt is being integrated into the DynEmp data infrastructure, enabling assessments of the patterns and drivers of business dynamics across firms and sectors. This effort also strengthens Egypt’s capacity to design effective policies that foster economic growth, boost firm performance, and expand employment opportunities.
This review presents new insights into Egypt’s business landscape, identifying potential constraints to firm creation, scaling, and formalisation, especially for young firms, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and women-owned businesses. It highlights the importance of facilitating business creation, addressing informality, and expanding the role of SMEs and women-owned businesses. The report also recommends concrete steps to improve Egypt’s data infrastructure. It calls for building a statistical business register and urges better use of higher quality administrative data to study business dynamics and support evidence-based policy making. The analysis of the report is based on the most recent available data and information as of March 2026.
The project began in October 2022 and benefits from on-the-ground fact-finding and policy missions which took place in October 2022 and September 2024, respectively. This work was undertaken as part of the Egypt Country Programme (ECP), under Pillar 1, “Economic growth”. The ECP will be a key source of information, practices and guidance for the successful design and implementation of structural reforms to address Egypt’s main economic challenges. It will also enable Egypt to move towards closer alignment with OECD standards and serve a guide for implementing the recently revised sustainable development strategy, Egypt Vision 2030.