Rasha M. ElAkkad
The demographic transition theory and the demographic window of opportunity (DWO) have been tested in several developed and most likely developing countries since the beginning of the 1990s. Regarding Egypt, demographic data from The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) predicts that the country is about to enter the DWO phase. In order to realize how to maximize the possible benefits from this DWO in Egypt, two main models were developed in this paper in an attempt to determine the main economic and demographic variables that influence the dependency ratio and thus economic growth over the period 1980-2022. The results reveal that; total number of students enrolled at all levels of pre-university education, Total Educational Attainment and GDP per capita are the main variables with highest significant effect on the dependency ratio in Egypt and that the latter is the most influential. The strong relation between GDP per capita and dependency ratio can be explained as with the reduction in the dependency ratio, public and private savings will increase and eventually will be directed towards increased human and capital investments. On the other side, the Employment to Population Ratio, Gross Domestic Savings and Government Effectiveness are found to have significant impact on economic growth with the latter being the most influential. This indicates that government effectiveness plays the major role in channeling domestic savings that’s expected to increase as a result of reduced dependency ratio to finance economic growth.
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