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An Unlimited Supply of Labor? Counting Workers and Planning Development in Mid-Twentieth-Century Egypt (1939–1960)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2025

Malak Labib
Malak Labib*
Affiliation:
Forum Transregionale Studien/Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, Germany
*
Email: malak.labib@cmb.hu-berlin.de
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Abstract

In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging “Third World.” This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the “labor problem” and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources—including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization—the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.

Keywords

laborstatisticsdevelopmentplanningindustrializationEgyptMiddle East

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Type
Special Feature
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 108 , October 2025 , pp. 269 - 285
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

In a 1958 study on labor and industrialization in Egypt, the American economist Frederick Harbison and the Egyptian labor official Ibrahim Abdelkader Ibrahim argued that “Egypt’s most plentiful, if not almost limitless resource, is uneducated, untrained and unskilled manpower.”Footnote 1 For Harbison and Ibrahim, as for most of the advisors of Egypt’s revolutionary regime, mobilizing the vast surplus of low-paid labor was a key aspect of the country’s development efforts. How should this centrality of labor in policymakers’ and experts’ visions of development in Egypt be understood? The present article addresses this question by examining how industrial work became an object of measurement as part of colonial wartime mobilization policies and postwar plans for economic modernization. It traces the rise of a statistical and economic discourse on “surplus labor,” which contributed to shaping the terms of the debate on development in Egypt and in other countries of what was becoming the “Third World.”

By analyzing how Egyptian economists and policymakers, British officials, and international experts measured work and debated the “labor question,” my study intervenes in two main bodies of literature. Historians of quantification have investigated the co-construction of statistics and economic policies. Some have explored the systems of statistical description that were associated with economic planning experiments in twentieth-century Europe.Footnote 2 Scholars have also begun scrutinizing the role played by statistics in the rise of development planning internationally, and have traced the rise of a set of quantitative tools and categories through which development came to be measured and classified.Footnote 3 These statistical and economic instruments circulated globally, and were appropriated and transformed by economists and policymakers in the decolonizing world, according to their political goals, visions, and imaginaries.Footnote 4 Building and expanding on this literature, this article examines the intersections between transnational economic expertise and bureaucratic knowledge-making in mid-twentieth-century Egypt. During that period, concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as central tools for thinking about the economic development of “underdeveloped areas.”Footnote 5 I argue that Egypt—a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally—was a key site where these statistical and economic concepts were constructed and debated. I show how the production of new categories for thinking about labor and development was the result of an interactive and sometimes conflictual process that brought together a range of local, colonial, and international actors through transnational circuits of knowledge transmission. In this way, the actors involved contributed to the production of the global conceptual binary of underdevelopment/development, but also to controversies around how to achieve rapid economic growth and what modernization meant.Footnote 6

This article also engages with the historiography of Nasserism in Egypt. This large and diverse body of work has examined the origins of the Nasserite state, the social structures that underlay it, the regime’s economic policies, and the modes of political domination and ideological control that characterized it.Footnote 7 Scholars have analyzed from various perspectives the policies of state-led development adopted by the regime, which culminated in its first five-year plan (1960–1965).Footnote 8 However, the technical instruments and forms of measurement that shaped Egypt’s planning experiment have been left largely unexamined. This paper aims to partly fill this gap by documenting the statistical construction of the “labor problem.” I trace the emergence of a set of new statistical tools, categories, and discourses that constructed the population as a central economic resource to be mobilized as part of the postcolonial industrialization project.Footnote 9

In order to trace these processes, the article uses a variety of sources, including previously unexplored Egyptian government archives and state publications, as well as documents from the British Foreign Office and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The article first examines the development of labor statistics during World War II, and then looks at postwar controversies about the measurement of unemployment and underemployment and their connection with the rise of development planning.

Measuring labor and planning development during World War II

The emergence of large-scale industry in British-ruled Egypt dates back to the turn of the twentieth century and consisted mainly of enterprises processing agricultural products.Footnote 10 However, a dominant position in the economy continued to be held by small artisanal production until the 1930s, when there was a rapid expansion of industrial production, stimulated by the rise of the Egyptian business elite. Local entrepreneurs pursued a strategy of economic diversification, based on cooperation with foreign capital, developing an industrial sector alongside the dominant agricultural sector. This process was facilitated by the gradual increase in Egypt’s political and economic autonomy, with the adoption of a series of protective tariffs for manufactured goods in the 1930s, as well as the abolition of capitulations.Footnote 11 However, the main catalyst for the development of large-scale production and of an industrial workforce was World War II. During the war, Egypt took on a new significance in British policy in the Middle East. It became the headquarters of the Middle East Supply Center (MESC), an Anglo-American agency responsible for rationalizing supplies for countries in the region; the war effort also led to the creation of military workshops employing large numbers of workers.Footnote 12 Moreover, the disruption of trade across the Mediterranean stimulated the expansion of local industries, notably textile production, food processing, and construction.Footnote 13 It was in this wartime context that industrial labor emerged as an object of statistical investigation, between the government’s efforts to regulate living standards and the mobilization of labor for the war effort.

Calculating and stabilizing living standards

Both the Egyptian government and colonial authorities had long been collecting various kinds of socioeconomic statistics.Footnote 14 However, the government began systematically collecting statistics on industrial labor only in 1940. That year, Egypt adopted the ILO’s Convention on Statistics of Wages and Hours of Work, following which the government statistics department introduced a three yearly census of industrial establishments and a semiannual statistical enquiry on wages and working hours.Footnote 15 The adoption of the Convention has to be understood as part of the longer history of relations between Egypt and the ILO. Since the 1930s, the ILO’s reformist agenda had begun to resonate with the concerns of Egyptian elites, who were confronted with an increasingly pressing labor question and rising labor activism, and in 1936, Egypt became the second African country to join the ILO.Footnote 16

For both Egyptian officials and British colonial authorities, the compilation of labor statistics took on particular significance during the war. High inflation and shortages of essential commodities were accompanied by a number of strikes in the large cities (Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez).Footnote 17 In this context, the introduction of wage statistics could serve as a tool for measuring changes in the standard of living of workers.Footnote 18 However, it was only at the end of the war that the first semiannual bulletin of Statistics of Wages and Working Hours was published, in July 1945.

Attempts by the authorities to stabilize workers’ economic conditions during the war also translated into the use of statistics on the cost of living. Though the compilation of such statistics in Egypt dated back to the 1920s, the government’s anxieties about inflation and the threat of unrest in the large cities during the war led to an increasing interest in workers’ living standards.Footnote 19 The adoption in December 1942 of a law requiring industrial and commercial businesses to pay a cost-of-living allowance to their workers was preceded by a survey conducted by the Statistical Department aimed at calculating the monthly cost of food, fuel, and soap for a worker with a wife and two dependents; it concluded that the amount necessary to maintain a “decent existence” was 438.9 piastres per month, at a time when the mean monthly wage was only 292.5 piastres.Footnote 20 Some large private companies compiled their own statistics. For example, the British oil company Shell issued a bimonthly cost-of-living report.Footnote 21 The report provided a calculation of household expenses—for food, clothing, medicine, and schooling—for the company’s employees. It also contained a calculation of the cost-of-living index for workers earning ten piastres a day, based on government statistics and the company’s own estimates.Footnote 22

These public and private statistics fed into wider debates, involving bureaucrats, social scientists, and reformers, concerning labor legislation and state involvement in social welfare programs aimed at the industrial workforce.Footnote 23 Simultaneously, the calculation of the cost-of-living allowance and the establishment of a minimum wage were at the center of worker protests both during and after the war.Footnote 24

Counting workers: Anglo-Egyptian controversies

The centrality that labor and employment statistics assumed in the 1940s was also connected with the war effort. The military workshops established by the British in Egypt employed tens of thousands of workers, most of whom were men who had recently migrated from the countryside.Footnote 25 Regulating the labor supply for the army required conducting surveys. The first was undertaken in October 1942 by the Office of the Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, following complaints about what was seen as a significant movement of workers from military workshops to civilian contractors.Footnote 26 It also aimed at determining whether there was a shortage of skilled and semiskilled labor, as military authorities were suggesting.Footnote 27 The survey provided information about the number of workers and artisans employed by the British Army, as well as statistics on labor shortages, labor needs, and worker turnover by area (Cairo, Alexandria, and the Canal area). Among the main causes identified for high turnover was low wages. The survey concluded: “Something must be done to attract and retain the best class of employees. Replacements for essential highly skilled men are constantly being sought, and the wage problems present considerable difficulties.”Footnote 28

Though the British authorities were initially concerned about a potential shortage of labor for military production, the situation was soon reversed. The 1942 survey had shown that the army was employing 134,000 artisans and workers, not counting the large number of workers employed by civil contractors.Footnote 29 By 1943, some British officials were already warning about potential problems in reabsorbing this workforce into the economy after the war. A memorandum produced by the MESC pointed out that “the problems of surplus labour are already arising and are certain to increase as the war draws away from the Middle East.”Footnote 30 The question was also at the center of the agenda of the Committee on Postwar Problems, which was set up in the summer of 1943 by the Egyptian government, led by the nationalist al-Wafd party.Footnote 31 The next year, a joint British-Egyptian special committee was established to discuss postwar employment policy, its purpose being “to study and make recommendations to the two Governments regarding the unemployment problem which will be created on the termination of the war by the discharge of large numbers of Egyptian and other workmen at present employed by the Military authorities and by other large employers for war purposes.”Footnote 32

In parallel, the Office of the Minister Resident launched a new labor survey in early 1944, this time covering all the British-controlled territories in the Middle East. This survey sought to estimate the number of workers and administrative personnel directly employed by the army and by civil contractors. In Egypt, questionnaires were sent to 274 private firms, requesting information about the numbers employed in war-related work, classified by their skill level, and the number of workers they expected to lay off after the war.Footnote 33 The statistics provided in response by private firms were less complete than those produced by military authorities. More than one hundred firms did not respond to the survey, including many in the metals, engineering, and chemical sectors; in addition, some firms were unable to provide estimates of future layoffs.Footnote 34

Although the results of the labor survey were incomplete, they were nevertheless used by various interested parties to defend competing interests and different visions of the postwar era, as illustrated by the debates within the Joint Committee on Post-War Employment Policy (JCPWEP).Footnote 35 Egyptian members of the committee, which included a number of government ministers and senior civil servants, used the survey figures to call for more British involvement in addressing the unemployment problem. Mamdūḥ Mursī, the director of revenue at the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, pointed out in September 1944 that “about 250,000 men were employed directly by the British Forces [while] normal peacetime employment in Egyptian industry did not much exceed 250,000. A very serious problem therefore existed and was aggravated by the fact that army discharges would be over a short period”; referring to the postwar five-year plan for public works that was being developed by the Egyptian government, he stressed the importance of coordinating layoffs with the different phases of the plan.Footnote 36 Other Egyptian members of the committee went further: for example, Rāḍī Abū Sayf Rāḍī, the director of the Labor Department, pressed the army to postpone layoffs until private enterprises were able to import new machinery and hire new workers. Other suggestions included handing military workshops over to the Egyptian government after the end of the war, and provision by the British of temporary financial assistance to unskilled workers who would be laid off.Footnote 37 These suggestions reflect the feeling widespread at the time among Egyptian elites that the British had a responsibility to the large number of workers who had contributed to the war effort; but they should also be understood in light of the pro-labor policy adopted by the Wafd party and its attempts to broaden its base within the labor movement during the war.Footnote 38

Ultimately, the Egyptian demands were mostly rejected by the British, who accused the Wafd government of “making capital out of the labor position in the Middle East.”Footnote 39 Army representatives in particular tried to downplay the magnitude of the postwar labor problem and the army’s own responsibility in settling it. During one of the committee’s meetings in September 1944, Brigadier Harold Prynne noted that “the labor employed by the War Department represented only 4 percent of the total male working population of Egypt and that recent articles in the press gave an unfortunate impression”; he argued that there would be little difficulty in absorbing unskilled labor, “most of which would return to the land,” though he admitted that employment of skilled labor would pose greater difficulties.Footnote 40

At the same time, there was no consensus among the British authorities on how to address the postwar unemployment problem in Egypt. These disagreements reflected the divergence of views among various players—the British embassy, the MESC, the Office of the Minister Resident—on the extent and form that British involvement in the postwar Middle East should take. For MESC officials, the unemployment problem was closely connected with the wider question of economic development in a region that could constitute a key market for British industries after the war—hence the importance of an active British role in addressing this problem. As argued by Keith Murray, the British head of the food division at the MESC:

Labour cannot be considered in vacuo. Post-war projects will require capital equipment, technical skill and advice as well as workers. Programming must be carried on in advance: Machinery and other materials will be in short supply for some years after the war; import programs and priorities will have to be decided in light of circumstances in each territory. We should know in advance which are the territories and which the industries that will be hit most severely when war demands come to an end.

We should have a clear idea of what alternative occupations could be found for displaced labour. We should know the equipment that will be required to set them up. Better communications (road and rail), soil conservation, irrigation, should be among the first “public works” projects for after the war; all of these require materials and technical advice. What areas are best suited for development? What labour supplies will be available and what organisation exists for coordinating the various demands? I do not believe anybody has even started to consider these questions for the Middle East. Concrete proposals cannot be put forward unless detailed studies are available of labour supplies and labour policies in these territories.Footnote 41

A first step suggested by the MESC in addressing the unemployment problem was to initiate a new labor survey, to be conducted by a “qualified labour economist”; the survey not only would cover workers employed by the army and its contractors, but would investigate more broadly the labor supply and the existing industrial employment in the region.Footnote 42 The proposed investigation was to be followed by discussions with local governments in the Middle East to formulate plans for absorbing surplus labor, as well as regional coordination in order to “assess relative urgencies as between territories and relative priorities for materials, machinery, etc.”Footnote 43

The plan devised by the MESC should be understood first of all as a way of thwarting the ILO’s plan to conduct its own regional labor survey, and thus of maintaining British control over a question that was considered crucial from a security point of view.Footnote 44 More broadly, the MESC’s plan for dealing with the “labor problem” was a way of promoting a role for itself in the postwar period as a regional development agency. However, such ambitions were met with ambivalence, if not opposition, from within the British government. The Office of the Minister Resident, for instance, warned that the MESC was “in danger of becoming unwieldy,” and argued for a greater role for local governments in dealing with postwar economic problems.Footnote 45

Ultimately, the MESC’s attempts to remake itself as a postwar development agency failed, because of both US opposition and the agency’s inability to foster cooperation with local governments.Footnote 46 A regional labor survey was still conducted in 1944–1945, but the MESC played no role in its implementation; it was entrusted instead to Robert Peers, the newly appointed labor advisor to the Office of the Minister Resident. The survey, covering Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Egypt, and Cyprus, assessed the impact of war employment in each country and made proposals for dealing with the expected increase in unemployment. While Peers’s final report provided detailed statistics on the workforce mobilized by the army, he admitted that the data that had been collected was insufficient.Footnote 47 Among those likely to find themselves unemployed were workers hired by private contractors, those engaged in war-related infrastructure projects, and workers employed in industries that had developed due to foreign trade restrictions. According to Peers, however, it was impossible to estimate the numbers working in these areas, and these uncertainties were particularly evident in the case of Egypt, which had the largest population in the region.Footnote 48

In this sense, the Peers labor survey, like previous investigations conducted during the war by the Egyptians and the British, raised more questions than it answered. Nevertheless, these investigations helped to shape the concept of surplus labor, which became central to development debates in postwar Egypt.

Between unemployment and underemployment: The problem of surplus labor

In 1944, Ḥusayn Ḥamdī, an official at the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs, published one of the first studies on the unemployment problem in Egypt, entitled Mushkilat al-baṭāla: Baḥth wa dirāsa muqārana (The problem of unemployment: a comparative study).Footnote 49 Ḥamdī compared the policies implemented by the governments of various industrialized countries since the 1930s to combat unemployment, with a final section devoted to the situation in Egypt.Footnote 50 The same year, the newly created JCPWEP discussed the creation by the Egyptian government of employment offices whose mission would be to help workers find employment and to collect statistics; here again, officials referred to foreign models and techniques. These international comparisons raised the question of the specificity of unemployment—and consequently of the means to measure it—in Egypt and in other “underdeveloped” countries, where wage labor was often not the norm.Footnote 51

How to measure unemployment? Early experiments with employment offices

One of the central issues in the early discussions concerning employment offices was whether and how these agencies would be able to collect unemployment statistics. The draft law submitted by the Egyptian Labor Department to the JCPWEP in 1944 would make employment offices the main instrument for collecting unemployment data. The law would oblige job seekers to register with their local employment office, and would require employers to send monthly lists of vacancies to employment offices.Footnote 52 The British raised objections to the proposed measures, arguing that they “would make employers suspicious of labour exchanges,” and that military workshops should in no way be subject to an obligation to send vacancy lists. The question of whether the data collected would be useful from a statistical point of view was also raised, given that the employment offices would initially be set up only in the country’s largest cities.Footnote 53

On the question of unemployment statistics, and of the labor problem more broadly, the British discussed the case of Egypt in relation with other countries of the region, and referred to other possible methods for measuring unemployment. G. H. Williams, the command secretary of the Middle East Forces and a member of the JCPWEP, mentioned the case of Mandate Palestine: British authorities there tried to emulate the model used in Canada, where unemployment estimates were derived indirectly from employment statistics.Footnote 54 Williams suggested testing this model in Egypt, but objections were once again raised. The Canadian system, it was pointed out, was based on collecting statistics on unemployed union members and on labor employed in large firms, and using them as samples from which to extrapolate general employment conditions. But this sampling method could not be used in Egypt, since, as noted by other members of the JCPWEP, trade unions and large firms were not numerous enough to constitute a “fair sample.”Footnote 55 The problem of how to measure unemployment remained unresolved in the years following the war. The employment offices did not become an effective tool for collecting statistics, since the 1945 law made it optional for employers to inform the agencies of vacancies, and for unemployed persons to register with the employment offices.

The question came under discussion again in the early 1950s. A few months after the Free Officers overthrew the monarchy and seized power in 1952, a government committee was established to deal with the large number of workers who had been dismissed by the British Army in Suez; its scope was soon broadened to include the unemployment problem as a whole. One of its main recommendations was the adoption of a law which would make it possible to “study the evolution of unemployment and develop appropriate solutions.”Footnote 56 In practice, however, the law on employment offices adopted in 1953 did not provide any new tools for measuring unemployment. Registration remained optional, and although the new law stipulated that employers could only hire persons who were registered at the employment offices, this clause was often circumvented, which resulted in fewer job seekers registering with the offices. In addition, data from the employment offices was inherently incomplete, as these offices were set up only in the large cities. By 1959, only eighteen offices had been created.Footnote 57

The concept of underemployment and the rise of development planning

These debates around unemployment measurement, which were raised in government circles throughout the 1940s and 1950s, raised a more fundamental question: Was the category “unemployed” relevant for describing the situation of the majority of workers in Egypt who found themselves out of work, whether for long or short periods? Some argued that the “labor problem” in Egypt was less a problem of unemployment than of underemployment. This applied, for instance, to the large number of laborers who worked in seasonal industries (e.g., sugar refining, cotton ginning and pressing) and devoted the rest of their time to agriculture, thus increasing the volume of what an Egyptian economist called “invisible unemployment.”Footnote 58 It also applied to workers who had been hired on a temporary basis in war-related industries or infrastructure projects, and would (or so it was expected) return to agricultural work as industrial employment opportunities declined after the war. The debate on unemployment in industry thus led to a broader one on underemployment, which was closely tied with the question of the relationship between the industrial and rural economies.

The first postwar estimate of underemployment in Egypt appeared in Doreen Warriner’s study Land and Poverty in the Middle East, published in 1948. Warriner, a British economist and a former official with the MESC in Cairo, produced an estimate of what she called the “surplus agricultural population.” According to her, no less than 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in Egypt was “surplus to requirements”—in the sense that it could be withdrawn without affecting production—arguing that so large a labor surplus kept living standards low, which in turn hindered the increase of demand for industrial goods.Footnote 59 Warriner’s figure itself relied on a questionable estimate that had been produced a decade earlier by the American sociologist Wendell Cleland. In his influential 1936 book The Population Problem in Egypt, Cleland presented the result of an experiment conducted in a medium-sized farm near Cairo, which was supervised by “intelligent management” but used ordinary peasant labor, and where the area cultivated by one man was five times higher than the Egyptian average.Footnote 60 On the basis of the observations drawn from this single experiment, Cleland concluded that at least half of the agricultural population in Egypt could be considered “surplus.”Footnote 61 As Omnia El Shakry has shown, these calculations were themselves part of a broader discourse on “overpopulation” and social reform, produced by Egyptian and foreign experts and writers, in the late 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 62

Yet it was only in 1957 that the first systematic investigation into the problem of underemployment was undertaken, as part of the new labor force survey launched by the statistical institutions of the Free Officers regime.Footnote 63 The survey, which was to be conducted three times a year, was aimed at determining the size of the workforce and its “distribution by geographical area, gender, age, occupation, industry, and its employment rate (darajat al-ʿimāla) in the entire territory of the Republic of Egypt, using family samples.”Footnote 64 The question of underemployment was addressed by collecting sample information on the number of days worked per week and per month, and the number of hours worked per week.Footnote 65

Discussions of underemployment and how to measure it were not limited to Egypt. While the concept of underemployment, as well as that of disguised unemployment, had appeared in the economic literature as early as the 1920s, the question of how to measure it took on particular significance internationally in the postwar period.Footnote 66 Unemployment levels in the “Third World” seemed to be rising rapidly, yet at the same time the concept of unemployment could not account for the forms of “labor insufficiency” observed in these countries.Footnote 67 In 1957—the same year that the first labor force survey was conducted in Egypt—the Ninth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, convened by the ILO, formed a committee to examine the issue. Delegates from “underdeveloped countries,” including Egypt, called for the adoption of definitions and standards for measuring underemployment, as well as for provision of technical assistance to carry out statistical studies on the issue.Footnote 68 Though the committee’s discussions led to the adoption of the first international definition of underemployment, this definition was met with some reservations. The Egyptian delegate and the country’s leading statistician, Abdel Moneim El Shafei, noted for instance that “the text (…) of the resolution, relating to the normal duration of work to be used as a basis of comparison in identifying persons in employment of less than normal duration, would imply that it did not cover underemployment of certain seasonal workers.”Footnote 69 In addition, statisticians failed to reach agreement on what they called “invisible underemployment,” that is, full-time workers designated as underemployed on the basis of low earnings or low productivity levels.Footnote 70

In Egypt, measuring underemployment in the 1950s was critical, as the revolutionary regime was seeking to accelerate the country’s industrial development through planning policies. Less than a year after the coup, the ruling officers established the Permanent Council for the Development of National Production (al-Majlis al-Dā’im li Tanmiyat al-Intāj al-Qawmī), or PCDNP, whose mission was to draft a national industrial strategy, set priorities for investment, and coordinate development programs. And in 1957, the newly created Ministry of Industry, headed by Egyptian engineer ʿAzīz Ṣidqī, launched a five-year industrial plan with a strong emphasis on public enterprise. Like Ṣidqī, many Egyptian experts, who had earned their graduate degrees in the United States and Europe in the 1940s and later joined the new regime’s economic institutions, viewed planned industrial development as a key remedy to the country’s labor and economic problems.Footnote 71 For instance, Ali El-Gritly, who completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1940s and later joined the PCDNP, argued in his thesis, which dealt with industrial development in Egypt, that “the only way out of the present morass of poverty is the transfer of a substantial part of the agricultural population to secondary and tertiary occupations.”Footnote 72 According to El-Gritly, such a shift would increase the ratio of land per worker in agriculture, strengthen industrial production, and ultimately raise the country’s national income. Similarly, Said El-Naggar, also a member of the PCDNP and a lecturer in economics at Cairo University, argued for the expansion of labor-intensive light industries with low skill requirements as a way of expanding industrial employment.Footnote 73

As Ahmad Shokr has argued, these economists were an integral part of the “circuits of intellectual transmission through which postwar development ideology was disseminated.”Footnote 74 Their analyses of the labor problem echoed and intersected with the ideas promoted by international experts who visited Egypt in the 1950s. In 1953, the rising figure in development economics, William Arthur Lewis, who had supervised El-Gritly doctoral thesis at the LSE,Footnote 75 was invited to give a series of lectures at the National Bank of Egypt and at the Society of Political Economy, Statistics and Legislation, which brought together many of the country’s economic and intellectual elites. Lewis argued in his lectures that because Egypt, like India, had a large labor surplus, workers’ wages were depressed, which presented entrepreneurs with an opportunity to establish labor-intensive industries. According to Lewis, in both Egypt and India around a quarter of the agricultural population could be considered surplus, meaning that “the marginal productivity of labor in agriculture [was] zero” or even negative.Footnote 76 Among the industries that could absorb this surplus labor and had a sufficiently large domestic market to support local manufacturing, he mentioned cement production, brickmaking, the glass, pottery, wood, and leather industries, food processing, textiles, shoes, and tobacco. Lewis’s lectures in Cairo prefigured the article he published a year later, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” which contributed to making the field of development economics a distinct branch of study.Footnote 77 In that article Lewis used the concept of “unlimited supply of labour” to argue that in countries that had large labor surpluses, economic development was contingent on the transfer of labor from the traditional subsistence sector to the modern industrial one.

Lewis’s dualistic vision of development must be understood as part of a broader discourse on industrialization and social change inspired by the modernization paradigm, which occupied a central place in American (and Western, more broadly) social science in the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote 78 As a decolonizing country pursuing an ambitious industrialization program, one initially supported by US funding and expertise, Egypt was conceived of as a “developmental laboratory,”Footnote 79 where such visions of economic and social modernization could be tested and debated.

For instance, in the same year as Lewis’s visit to Egypt, a survey was launched as part of the Ford Foundation–funded project “Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development,” a comparative research project led by four American economists closely associated with modernization theory (Frederick Harbison, Clark Kerr, Charles Myers, and John Dunlop).Footnote 80 Egypt—described as an “industrializing country which has high aspirations for rapid economic growth” —was selected as a key case study for the project.Footnote 81 Research on the ground was conducted by Harbison and Ibrahim, with the aim of investigating “human problems in industrialization” by examining the development of labor and organizational resources for industrial expansion (e.g., government educational and employment policies, entrepreneurship, and management practices in industry). Like Lewis’s theory, the framework adopted by the Inter-University project was based on a linear vision of development based on an opposition between traditional forms of organization and “industrial modernity.” However, the shared framework did not preclude disagreements over policy orientations. For instance, while Harbison and Ibrahim noted that Egypt had “vast surpluses of unemployed or underemployed agricultural labor, which … are located fairly close to the centers where industrial establishments are concentrated,”Footnote 82 they argued that industrial production in large factories could significantly increase without a similar increase in employment. This prediction was based on expected productivity improvements through work rationalization and increased use of labor-saving machinery in industry. “Industrialization,” they concluded, “is not likely to provide much of an answer to the problem of general employment.”Footnote 83

Similar debates shaped the creation of the country’s first five-year plan for economic development. Ultimately, although the National Planning Commission (Lajnat al-Takhṭīṭ al-Qawmī), which was in charge of drafting the plan, placed heavy emphasis on industrialization, it did not envision the mobilization of surplus labor in industry, arguing that “modern industries depend by their very nature more on capital equipment than on the human factor.”Footnote 84 The plan relied instead on an expansion of capital-intensive industries, such as petroleum, steel, and automobile. Some of these industries had been developing since the 1940s and early 1950s,Footnote 85 and the government’s growing reliance on Soviet economic assistance at the end of the 1950s reinforced this trend.Footnote 86 Industry was projected to account for only 20 percent of the expected expansion in employment over the five-year period.Footnote 87 Surplus labor in agriculture, estimated at around 23 percent of the agricultural workforce, was projected to remain in that sector and to be absorbed by the expansion of cultivated land that was anticipated following the completion of the Aswan High Dam.

Yet, the statistical language developed around industrial labor would continue to shape the work of Egyptian economists and planners. The launch of the five-year plan was accompanied by the creation of new economic bodies, such as the National Planning Institute (al-Maʿhad al-Qawmī li-l-Takhṭīṭ) and the National Institute of Management Development (al-Maʿhad al-Qawmī li-Tanmiat al-Idāra), which placed the issue of labor planning at the center of their attention. From studies on labor needs in various industrial sectors, to seminars on the social effects of industrialization, the management of “human resources” for purposes of economic development grew as a distinct field of expertise and intervention.Footnote 88

Conclusion

This article has traced how industrial labor became an object of measurement in wartime and postwar Egypt, and how these quantitative practices shaped the development plans of national, colonial, and international actors during Egypt’s postcolonial transition. Labor surveys, from the early surveys conducted by British bureaucrats to those launched by the Free Officers regime, helped shape the debate on surplus labor and industrialization, while these statistical innovations gave rise to a new language of “human resources” and “manpower planning.” Concomitantly, Egypt became a testing ground for thinking about these questions internationally.

In the 1950s, planners and experts in Egypt examined whether and how to mobilize surplus labor, mostly in the agricultural sector, as part of the state’s industrialization plans, but a decade later, the terms of the problem had changed. The adoption of nationalization policies and the rise of a vast public sector in the 1960s resulted in a significant increase in employment in government and industry. By the end of the country’s first five-year plan, voices were already being raised calling for rationalization of the “overstaffed” public sector.

Simultaneously, the question of underemployment in agriculture received extensive attention from Egyptian planners and their international advisers.Footnote 89 The surveys they conducted in the 1960s questioned the hypothesis of a surplus of agricultural labor, that is, the idea that labor could be taken out of the agricultural sector without negative effects on production. By paying attention to the seasonality of labor needs in agriculture, as well as to the rationality of the various actors involved in the agricultural economy, this body of research questioned some of the key assumptions that had shaped mid-twentieth-century development theory.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was supported by the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale as well as the Gerda Henkel Foundation, through a fellowship at the EUME program (Forum Transregionale Studien)/Centre Marc Bloch. I would like to thank Annick Lacroix, Laure Piguet, Léa Renard, and Alexander Keese for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also benefited from the discussions following the presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the seminar of the Society for the Social Studies of Quantification (January 2025). I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and constructive suggestions on the manuscript.

References

Notes

1. Frederick Harbison and Ibrahim Abdelkader Ibrahim, Human Resources for Egyptian Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 135.

2. See, e.g., Alain Desrosières, Gouverner par les nombres: L’argument statistique II (Paris: Presses des Mines, 2008), 28–52; Martine Mespoulet, Construire le socialisme par les chiffres (Paris: INED, 2008).

3. See Stephen Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 11–41; Daniel Speich, “The Use of Global Abstractions: National Income Accounting in the Period of Imperial Decline,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (2011): 7–28; Corinna Unger, “Development Knowledge: A Twentieth-Century Perspective,” in The Routledge Handbook on the History of Development, ed. Corinna Unger, Iris Boroway, and Corinne Pernet (New York: Routledge, 2022), 315–28.

4. See Louise Barré, “Compter pour planifier: Dénombrement de la population et ‘capitalisme d’État’ en Côte d’Ivoire (1954–1967),” Politique africaine 145 (2017): 109–28; Gerardo Serra, “An Uneven Statistical Topography: The Political Economy of Household Budget Surveys in Late Colonial Ghana, 1951–1957,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 35, no. 1 (2014): 9–27; Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

5. On postwar efforts by international organizations to develop a globally applicable concept of unemployment, see Aaron Benanav, “The Origins of Informality: The ILO at the Limit of the Concept of Unemployment,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 1 (2018): 107–25.

6. My analysis intersects here with Nathan Citino’s argument about the contested and multidirectional nature of development and modernization in the Middle East; see Nathan Citino, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

7. For a recent survey of the historiography of Nasserism, see Ahmad Shokr, Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025), 6–7.

8. The historiography of postrevolutionary Egypt produced a number of studies, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, that assessed Egypt’s statist experiment, from a political economy perspective. These include the works of Bent Hansen, Girgis Marzouk, Patrick O’Brien, Robert Mabro, and John Waterbury. More recent scholarship—including the works of Ellis Goldberg, Roel Meijer, and Ahmad Shokr—has discussed the origins of the state-led development policies, by examining the debates that shaped postwar economic thinking in Egypt. In addition, Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann have examined the global context, as well as the foreign influences and alliances that shaped the Free Officers’ early planning efforts. See Bent Hansen and Girgis A. Marzouk, Development and Economic Policy in the UAR (Egypt) (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1965); Robert Mabro, The Egyptian Economy, 1952–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Patrick O’Brien, The Revolution in Egypt’s Economic System: From Private Enterprise to Socialism, 1952–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Ellis Goldberg, Trade, Reputation and Child Labor in Twentieth Century Egypt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 88–118; Roel Meijer, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 66–95 and 173–207; Shokr, Harvests of Liberation, 156–70; Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 169–217; Steven Heydemann and Robert Vitalis, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East,” in War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 100–146.

9. I engage here with the work of Omnia El Shakry, who has traced the construction of the “population problem” and of the idiom of social welfare in interwar and postwar Egypt in The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). El Shakry argues that the Nasser era should be understood as part of a larger historical period stretching from the 1930s to the 1960s, which was “distinguished by a common discourse of social improvement and welfare” (El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 286). I draw on and complicate El Shakry’s analysis by examining how the rise of developmentalism was connected with the emergence of new categories through which the “population problem” was conceptualized.

10. Egypt was occupied by Britain in 1882 and officially declared a protectorate in 1914. Though Egypt gained formal independence in 1922, Britain continued to be involved in its political and economic affairs until the middle of the twentieth century.

11. See Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 257–59. The capitulatory system granted economic and juridical privileges to subjects of the European powers and their protégés.

12. See Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 259–63; Heydemann and Vitalis, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism,” 112.

13. See Ragaei El-Mallakh, “The Effects of the Second World War on the Economic Development of Egypt” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1955), 155–71.

14. On the development of statistics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt, see Malak Labib, Recenser l’Égypte: Dette publique et politiques de la quantification à l’ère impériale, 1875–1922 (Cairo: IFAO/CEDEJ, 2024).

15. Aly Amin, “Labour in Egypt: A Study in Industrial Relations,” 1948, J3128, Foreign Office [hereafter FO] 371-73474, British National Archives [hereafter BNA], London.

16. See Antoinette Ferrand, “Définir le juste milieu: Histoire du concept de ‘classe moyenne’ dans l’Égypte de Nasser (1952–1970)” (PhD diss., Sorbonne University, 2024), 216–19; Mai Taha, “Reading ‘Class’ in International Law: The Labor Question in Interwar Egypt,” Social and Legal Studies 25, no. 5 (2016): 1–23.

17. See “Report by T. E. Evans, Second Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy in Cairo, on Conditions of Labour and Trade Unions in Egypt,” 28 July 1944, p. 12, J2671, FO 371-41380, BNA; Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 289.

18. See A. M. N. Shafei, “A Draft Convention on the Statistics of Wages and Hours of Labour,” L’Égypte contemporaine 29, no. 174/175 (1938): 61.

19. See Labib, Recenser l’Égypte, 158–69.

20. See A. I. El-Gritly, “The Structure of Modern Industry in Egypt,” L’Égypte contemporaine 38, no. 241 (1947): 530–31; Jamāl al-Dīn Saʿīd, Iqtiṣādiyyāt miṣr [The Egyptian economy] (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1950), 277–78. The sources consulted did not provide details on the sample and methodology of the survey.

21. See, for instance, Shell Company of Egypt Limited, Report on the Cost of Living in Egypt (February 1942), J2320, FO 371-31572, BNA.

22. One hundred piastres equal one Egyptian pound.

23. See Ahmed Zaki Badaoui, Les problèmes du travail et les organisations ouvrières en Égypte (Alexandria: Société de publications égyptiennes, 1948); Khaireya Khairy, “Nutritive Aspects of Egyptian Labor” (BA thesis, American University in Cairo, 1946); Rāḍī Abū Sayf Rāḍī, “Mushkilat al-ʿāmil,” Majallat al-shu’ūn al-ijtimāʿiyya 3 (1942): 33–42

24. See Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 288–89.

25. These workshops also employed women, but their numbers remained limited: in 1942, there were only 1,000 women employed by the army, out of a total of around 124,000 workers. See “Labor Survey of Egypt,” October 1942, FO 922-174, BNA.

26. The Minister of State Resident in the Middle East was a British cabinet position created in June 1941 and based in Cairo. The purpose of the position was to ensure the success of operations in the Middle East by relieving military commanders of additional responsibilities, as well as to provide military commanders with political guidance.

27. Note by W.T. Matthews, Office of the Minister of State, 1 October 1942, FO 922-174, BNA.

28. “Labor Survey of Egypt,” 23.

29. The survey report indicated that the British military authorities and the Royal Air Force put out to contract 41 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of the total work done. See “Labor Survey of Egypt,” 1.

30. K. Murray, “Labour Problems in the Middle East,” 10 July 1943, p. 1, FO 922/174, BNA. On the role of the MESC during the war, see Heydemann and Vitalis, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism,” 100–146.

31. See the report by T. E. Evans of 28 July 1944 (see note 17 above), 17.

32. Minutes of the first meeting of the Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, 10 August 1944, J3227, FO 371-41380, BNA.

33. See “Civilian Labour Employed by Private Contractors in the Middle East Countries in Connection with the War Effort: Analysis of Questionnaires Returned by Civilian Contractors to the British Army,” undated, J3411, FO 371-41380, BNA.

34. Ibid.

35. See the letter from the British Embassy in Cairo to M. al-Naḥḥās, 22 June 1944, and the letter from M. al-Naḥḥās to Lord Killearn, 10 July 1944, Majlis al-Wuzarā’ [hereafter MW] 0081-087217, Dār al-Wathā’iq al-Qawmiyya [hereafter DWQ].

36. See Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, Minutes of the first meeting of the Subcommittee on Re-employment, 16 September 1944, J3636, FO 371-4138, BNA. The five-year plan for the postwar period included a number of infrastructural and industrial projects. Its centerpiece was the Aswan scheme, which included construction of a hydroelectric power station in Aswan, a fertilizer manufacturing complex, and a steel plant. See Heydemann and Vitalis, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism,” 131–32.

37. See Minutes of informal meeting of the Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, 2 September 1944, J3374, FO 371-41380, BNA; Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, Minutes of the first meeting of the Subcommittee on Discharge Procedure, 8 September 1944, J3411, FO 371-41380, BNA.

38. On al-Wafd labor policy during the war, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 285–303.

39. “Middle East—Disposal of Civilian Labour at Present Employed in the War Effort,” draft minutes of a meeting held in the offices of War Cabinet, 4 August 1944, J2858, FO 371-4138, BNA.

40. Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, Minutes of the first meeting of subcommittee on discharge procedure, 8 September 1944, J 34118, FO 371-4138, BNA.

41. Note by K. Murray, attached to the letter from R. Jackson to A. Rucker, 24 May 1943, FO 922-174, BNA.

42. E. Bailey to R. Jackson, 27 July 1943, FO 922-174, BNA.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.; see also M. Nicholson to E. Bailey, 19 June 1943, FO 922-174, BNA.

45. Jackson to Rucker, 5 May 1943, FO 922-174, BNA.

46. On this point, see Heydemann and Vitalis, “War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism,” 135; Paul Kingston, Britain and the Politics of Modernization in the Middle East, 1945–1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12–18.

47. See “Labour and Employment in the Middle East—Egypt,” report to the Minister Resident by Professor R. Peers, March 1945, pp. 2–3, FO 921-321, BNA.

48. See “Labour and Employment in the Middle East—Egypt,” 1.

49. Ḥusayn Ḥamdī, Mushkilat al-baṭāla: Baḥth wa dirāsa muqārana [The Problem of unemployment: A comparative study] (Cairo: Jamāʿat al-kitāb, 1944).

50. Ḥusayn’s study was followed by numerous other works on the topic, including ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Mihanna, Al-Baṭāla wa-l-ʿimāla al-kāmila [Unemployment and full employment], published in 1946, and the Arabic translation of George Howard Cole’s The Means of Full Employment (London: Gollancz, 1943), which appeared in 1952.

51. See Benanav, “The Origins of Informality,” 108.

52. See Joint Committee on Post War Employment Policy, first meeting of Sub-committee (c) on Joint Employment Bureau, 5 September 1944, J3379, FO 371-41380, BNA.

53. Ibid.

54. G. H. Williams to Fischer, 23 September 1944, FO 921-311, BNA.

55. Fischer to Williams, 5 October 1944, FO 921-311, BNA.

56. Wizārat al-Shu’ūn al-Ijtimāʿiyya [Ministry of Social Affairs], Mudhakkira marfūʿa li-majlis al-wuzarā’ [Memorandum to the Council of Ministers], 23 February 1953, MW 0081-08721, DWQ.

57. Wizārat al-Shu’ūn al-Ijtimāʿiyya, “Mudhakkira īḍāḥiyya li-mashrūʿ al-marsūm bi-mashrūʿ qānūn fī sha’n takhdīm al-ʿummāl al-ʿāṭilīn” [Memorandum on the employment of unemployed draft law], 19 February 1952, MW 0081-053934, DWQ. Ibrāhīm al-Ghaṭrīfī, Al-Takhṭīṭ bi-l-quwwā al-ʿāmila [Planning labor] (Cairo: National Planning Institute, 1961).

58. Aly Amin, “Labour in Egypt: A Study in Industrial Relations,” 1948, J3128, FO 371-73474, BNA.

59. Doreen Warriner, Land and Poverty in the Middle East (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948), 33.

60. See Wendell Cleland, The Population Problem in Egypt: A Study of Population Trends and Conditions in Modern Egypt (Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1936), 104–6.

61. Despite the fact that this conclusion was drawn from an experiment conducted on a single farm, Cleland’s estimate was also cited more broadly by studies in the emerging field of development economics. See Ragnar Nurkse, Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 35; United Nations Department of Economic Affairs, Measures for the Development of Underdeveloped Countries (New York: United Nations, 1951), 9. I shall return to this point below.

62. See El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 145–64.

63. Al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Iḥṣā’ [Central Committee of Statistics], Iḥṣā’ al-quwwā al-ʿāmila bi-l-ʿayina fī iqlīm miṣr, 1958–1959 [Labor force sample survey in Egypt, 1958–1959] (Cairo: al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Iḥṣā’, 1960). The survey was placed under the supervision of the State Statistical Department and the Ministry of Social Affairs.

64. Al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Iḥṣā’, al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Iḥṣā’ 1957–1958 [The Central Committee for Statistics 1957–1958] (Cairo: al-Lajna al-Markaziyya li-l-Iḥṣā’, 1958), 24.

65. See Abdel Moneim El Shafei, “The Current Labour Force Sample Survey in Egypt (U.A.R),” International Labour Review 82, no. 5 (1960): 441 and 447–48.

66. See Robert Tignor, Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 96–97; International Labour Office, The Ninth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva, 24 April to 3 May 1957 (Geneva: ILO, 1957), 4.

67. Benanav, “The Origins of Informality,” 107.

68. See International Labour Office, The Ninth International Conference, 36.

69. International Labour Office, The Ninth International Conference, 55.

70. See Benanav, “The Origins of Informality,” 113.

71. See Shokr, Harvests of Liberation, 166–70.

72. Ali El-Gritly, The Structure of Modern Industry in Egypt (Cairo: Government Press, 1948), 575, cited by Shokr, Harvests of Liberation, 168.

73. See Said El-Naggar, Industrialisation and Income with Special Reference to Egypt (Cairo: Fouad I University Press, 1952). On El-Naggar’s writings, see Goldberg, Trade, Reputation and Child Labor, 110–17.

74. Shokr, Harvests of Liberation, 168.

75. Ibid.

76. William Arthur Lewis, Aspects of Industrialization: National Bank of Egypt, Fiftieth Anniversary Commemoration Lecture (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1953), 7, cited by Tignor, Arthur Lewis, 87. Tignor’s study offers a detailed biography of Lewis.

77. William Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” The Manchester School 22, no. 2 (1954): 139–91. See also Tignor, Arthur Lewis, 88–89.

78. See Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 379–82; Tignor, Arthur Lewis, 93.

79. Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3.

80. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 107–12; Ethan Schrum, The Instrumental University: Education in the Service of the National Agenda after World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 51–54.

81. See Harbison and Ibrahim, Human Resources, vii. The other main case studies selected by the Inter-University group were Japan, India, Italy, France, Germany, and the USSR.

82. Harbison and Ibrahim, Human Resources, 135.

83. Harbison and Ibrahim, Human Resources, 138.

84. UAR National Planning Committee, General Frame for the 5-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (Cairo: National Planning Committee, 1960), 13.

85. See Robert Mabro, “Industrial Growth, Agricultural Under-Employment and the Lewis Model: The Egyptian Case, 1937–1965,” Journal of Development Studies 3, no. 4 (1967): 343–45.

86. See Robert Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945 –1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 180–84.

87. See Hansen and Marzouk, Development and Economic Policy, 298.

88. On this point, see also Valeska Huber, “Planning Education and Manpower in the Middle East, 1950s–60s,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2017): 95–117.

89. See, e.g., Bent Hansen and Mona El Tomy, “The Seasonal Employment Profile in Egyptian Agriculture,” Journal of Development Studies 1, no. 4 (1965): 399–409; Bent Hansen, “Marginal Productivity Wage Theory and Subsistence Wage Theory in Egyptian Agriculture,” Journal of Development Studies 2, no. 4 (1966): 367–407; Hanaa Keir El Dine, The Cotton Production Function in the U.A.R. and Its Relation to Technical Progress and to Disguised Unemployment, Institute of National Planning Memo 370 (Cairo: National Planning Institute, 1963). During the early 1960s, the National Planning Institute also undertook, in collaboration with the ILO, a survey of rural employment.