تقدير عرض العمالة فى القطاع الزراعى المصرى[Estimating Labor Supply in the Egyptian Agricultural Sector]

Labor input is considered one of the most important inputs in the economy, especially in the agricultural sector, which contributes in increasing production and employment, so it must be push the cycle of economic development to achieve the most economic efficiency from available inputs and agricultural labor input, it can be said that human labor input has affected the structural changes with economic liberalization policy in Egypt, that has direct effects on the structure of cropping pattern. The main research problem of the study, can be summarized in the difficulty of estimation the agricultural labor supply, and the difficulty of estimation unemployment in Egypt. The objective of the study is to assess labor supply in the agricultural sector, and its forecasting in the future. To achieve the above objective, the study applied some analysis tools and statistical methods, i.e., simple regressions, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average forecasting models (ARIMA), and linear and quadratic expenditure systems. The data were collected from different sources through the period (1985-2004). The study selected quadratic expenditure system (QES), which gave high R2, the results indicated that, expenditure on the leisure for agricultural labor comes in the third order, among food, non food, services good, and there was negative relation between labor wage and the demand for leisure, so increasing in labor wage will lead to decreasing in the demand for leisure and increasing labor supply. Labor supply according to (QES) model reached about 5.25 million laborers, while the demand for labor reached about 4.75 million laborers, this mean there is 0.50 million laborers don’t work, so the unemployment rate reached about 9.44% as average of the period subject to study (1985-2004). The forecasting of agricultural unemployment rate through the average period (2005-2007), reached about 13.53%, and will be 14.89% through the average period (2008-2012) Finally the study asserted, to rise agricultural employment, i.e., expanding in cultivation crops that have intensity of labor, adoption technology encourage labor intensity. expanding the agricultural projects, i.e., small rural industrial.