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In this paper we examine the influence of gender, sibling characteristics and birth order on the schooling attainment of school-age Egyptian children. We use multivariate analysis to simultaneously examine three different schooling outcomes of a child having "no schooling", "less than the desired level of schooling", and an "age-appropriate level of schooling". Estimation results show strong evidence of gender, birth order and sibling characteristics on schooling attainment, with female and rural children particularly disadvantaged. Interestingly, our results show adverse effects on the schooling outcomes of first-born male children. Finally, we show that an improvement in parental education has large, positive and significant effects on the schooling attainment of children. (Contains 3 endnotes and 5 tables.)

In this paper we examine the influence of gender, sibling characteristics and birth order on the schooling attainment of school-age Egyptian children. We use multivariate analysis to simultaneously examine three different schooling outcomes of a child having 'no schooling', 'less than the desired level of schooling', and an 'age-appropriate level of schooling'. Estimation results show strong evidence of gender, birth order and sibling characteristics on schooling attainment, with female and rural children particularly disadvantaged. Interestingly, our results show adverse effects on the schooling outcomes of first-born male children. Finally, we show that an improvement in parental education has large, positive and significant effects on the schooling attainment of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wasting is one of the symptoms of malnutrition that has been connected to the deaths of malnourished children. This study was intended to explain the effect of socio‐demographic and economic factors on under‐5 wasting by evaluating their conditional effect across the distribution of weight‐for‐height Z (WHZ) scores using the quantile regression (QR) model. The weighted sample which included 13,680 children under 5 years was taken from the countrywide Egyptian DHS 2014 survey. The results depicted that about 2% of Egyptian children were severely wasted, with the prevalence of wasting being around 8%. It was discovered that across the WHZ distribution, the child's features, maternal characteristics, father's education, and social factors had significant but varied contributions in explaining the wasting status of under‐5 children. It was revealed that female children had a significant weight advantage, notably 0.21 standard deviation (SD) higher weight at the 95th quantile over their male counterparts. The WHZ score was also found to be significantly positively associated with both age and household's wealth status at the lower and upper tails of the WHZ distribution, respectively. Moreover, in comparison with children whose mothers were underweight, those whose mothers were normal or overweight had higher WHZ scores, with a 1.45 SD increase in WHZ scores at the 95th quantile for mothers who were normal weights. Furthermore, the children who were breastfed, whose mothers received antenatal care (ANC) services, and/or who had educated parents had an advantage in terms of WHZ scores than their counterparts. In addition, the children with higher birth order and/or who resided in urban areas had weight disadvantages compared to their counterparts. Therefore, in order to improve children's nutritional status and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the government and public–private owner organizations must work together at the community level focusing on vulnerable groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Women's empowerment is often used to explain changes in reproductive behavior, but no consideration is given to how reproductive events can shape women's empowerment over time. Fertility may cause changes in women's empowerment, or they may be mutually influencing. Research on women's empowerment and fertility relies on cross-sectional data from South Asia, which limits the understanding of the direction of association between women's empowerment and fertility in other global contexts. This study uses two waves of a panel survey from a prominent Middle Eastern country, Egypt, to examine the trajectory of women's empowerment and the relationship between first and subsequent births and empowerment over time.Methods: Using longitudinal data from the 2006 and 2012 Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey, a nationally representative sample of households in Egypt, for 4660 married women 15 to 49 years old, multilevel negative binomial, ordinary least squares, and logistic regression models estimate women's empowerment and consider whether a first and subsequent births are associated with empowerment later in life. Women's empowerment is operationalized through four measures of agency: individual household decision-making, joint household decision-making, mobility, and financial autonomy.Results: A first birth and subsequent births are significantly positively associated with all measures of empowerment except financial autonomy in 2012. Women who have not had a birth make 30% fewer individual household decisions and 14% fewer joint household decisions in 2012 compared to women with a first birth. There is also a positive relationship with mobility, as women with a first birth have more freedom of movement compared to women with no births. Earlier empowerment is also an important predictor of empowerment later in life.Conclusions: Incorporating the influence of life events like first and subsequent births helps account for the possibility that empowerment is dynamic and that life course experiences shape women's empowerment. This and the notion that empowerment builds over time helps portray women's lives more completely, demonstrates the importance of empowerment early in the life course, and addresses issues of temporality in empowerment fertility research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]