The analysis compares Egypt with two benchmarks: OECD countries and emerging economies.
OECD countries include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Latvia, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Türkiye.1 Emerging economies include Brazil, Cambodia, Indonesia, Tunisia and Viet Nam.
For most economies, the evidence reported spans over the two latest available years, up to 2022. Table E.1 presents the countries included in the analysis, depending on data availability and information reliability. For countries with data for multiple years, the results show averages across the years considered.
To improve cross-country comparability, only manufacturing [C] and non-financial private sectors [G-N excluding K] have been considered in the analysis. Those sectors are better covered in the different countries available in the DynEmp database. As the DynEmp Stata® routine aggregates the data at the macro-sector level, all industries within manufacturing and non-financial private services are considered when examining macro-sectors.
Importantly, establishments/firms without employees are excluded from the analysis as those units are not well-represented in the data for some OECD countries. Indeed, most of the OECD countries have a sampling threshold of one employee.
While the Egyptian data are at the establishment level, data for most of the countries included in the benchmark are at the firm-level, except for Cambodia, Indonesia and Japan. This may affect the reported business size distribution for Egypt. Despite this, most establishments in the Egyptian Economic Census 2022/2023 consist of single branch firms (98%), thus limiting the concerns about comparability with OECD countries over most of the size distribution. However, the 2% multibranch firms are larger than the single branch firms, thus potentially leading to an underestimation of the employment of large businesses compared to OECD countries.
The terminology firm will be used in both cases, denoting establishments in Egypt – and in countries where data are at the plant level – and enterprises in other economies.