Does maternal employment affect child nutrition status? New evidence from Egypt

ABSTRACT

Even though maternal employment can increase family income, several studies suggest that it could have adverse consequences on children’s health. In this study, we use a nationally representative sample of 12,888 children, aged 0–5 years from Egypt to examine the impact of maternal employment on child nutritional indicators, namely: stunting, wasting, and being underweight and overweight. We adopted various estimation methods to control for observable and unobservable household characteristics in order to identify the causal effect of maternal employment. These different techniques include, propensity score matching (PSM), OLS regression with controlling for a wide range of individual characteristics, and an instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV 2SLS) approach. Results of the PSM and OLS suggest that maternal employment is weakly associated with having a malnourished child. On the other hand, the IV 2SLS suggests a stronger and significant association between maternal employment and poor nutritional status among children.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal employment
• child under-nutrition
• instrumental variable
• Egypt

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees and the handling editor of this journal for the invaluable comments and suggestions which substantially improved the manuscript. An earlier version of this paper has been published as an Economic Research Forum Working Paper series (No. 1149) (Rashad & Sharaf, 2017).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Results are available upon request.

2. These results, though not reported here, are very similar and are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Shoukry Rashad

Ahmed Shoukry Rashad: is a Senior Economist at the Economic Studies and Policies Sector at the Government of Dubai. His current research interests include the economic determinants of public health and health inequality, and poverty alleviation policies. He taught at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management and a consultant for the United Nations. Rashad is the author of 10 publications as peer-reviewed journal articles. Rashad obtained his PhD in Economics from Philipps University Marburgin 2016.

Mesbah Fathy Sharaf

Mesbah Sharaf is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Alberta and Damanhour University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Concordia University in Canada. His research interests are Development Economics, Health Economics and applied Econometrics. Dr. Sharaf is a consultant for several international organizations including UN-ESCWA, and the ERF.