We provide in this paper measures of inequality of opportunity of wages and consumption for Egypt
at different points in time from 1988 to 2012. A standard way of measuring the degree of inequality
of opportunity in a society is to choose a set of circumstances – characteristics of the individual’s
environment that affect his future income and are beyond his control – and to partition the population
into types, where a type is the set of individuals with the same circumstances. Inequality in the
outcomes of interest between types is attributable to inequality of opportunity, whereas inequality
within types is attributable to effort or luck. Although measures of inequality of wage income are
increasing over time in Egypt starting in 1998, the share attributable to circumstances appears to be
declining steadily throughout the whole period. We attribute this decline to the fact that outcomes for
the middle class are moving closer to the outcomes of the lower classes. The outcomes for the most
privileged groups remain quite different. Another possible explanation is that unobserved
circumstances are playing a growing role in inequality of opportunity in Egypt.