Intrahousehold resource allocation in Egypt : does women’s empowerment lead to greater investments in children?

Abstract EN

This paper presents new empirical evidence from Egypt on the existence of intrahousehold allocation bias.

We examine the effects of the women's status within the household regarding decisions on investment in children’s human capital—focusing specifically on children’s schooling and nutrition.

Special attention is paid to examine how the welfare of children living in an empowered female household is compared to their peers who live in low women's status households, and whether parents have identical preferences towards sons and daughters.

The results confirm that empowered women are more able to make positive investments in their children.

The influence of women’s status may operate differently for boys and girls, and may differently affect children’s educational outcome than their nutritional status.

Also, we find that parents do not always have identical preferences towards sons and daughters.