Impact of migration on women's empowerment and child schooling: the case of Egypt

Asmaa Elbadawy, Population Council
Rania Roushdy, Population Council

We would like to assess the impact of international migration and remittances on (1) women participation in decision-making and on (2) children schooling. To date, there has been no thorough examination of the effects of migration on children schooling in Egypt or in the MENA region. Our datasets are Egypt Labor Market Survey (ELMS 98) and the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS 06). The data contains information on remittances, return migrants, education, and women decision-making. We will exploit the panel dimension of the data to estimate the impact of migration in 1998 on women and children outcomes in 2006. The main estimation problem to overcome is the endogeneity of migration. Since migration opportunities tend to be network-dependent, we plan to use as instrument, the intensity of migration on the village level based on the 1996 Egyptian Census; or alternatively the percent of migrants at the ELMSs cluster level.