Household environment and child health in Egypt

Type Working Paper
Title Household environment and child health in Egypt
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2011
URL http://www.child.unito.it/papers/child13_2011.pdf
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of household circumstances on child health in Egypt, fo-cusing on child survival odds and mean height of surviving children. Our first objective is to investigate whether household circumstances, especially ownership of durables such as refrigerator, water heater and electric fan (“P-durables”), affects survival of children and thehealth of survivors. Our second objective is to investigate whether changes in the distribution of household circumstances lead to changes in the distribution of child health proxied by the distribution of child height (not only the mean). We address these issues by using repeated cross sectional micro-data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for Egypt spanning the period 1992–2008. While we find no evidence of gender difference in child survival,for biological reasons boys are on average taller than girls. Mother’s height and education are strongly positively associated with both survival odds and height of surviving children. On theother hand, mother’s age at child birth and father’s education are positively associated withsurvival odds but do not appear to matter for height of surviving children. Owning none of theP-durables reduces child survival odds by 10–20% and the average child height by about 0.4 cmrelative to the baseline of owning only one of them. Owning all three of them is associatedwith survival odds about 50% higher and average height about 0.4 cm higher than the baseline,implying a net difference of 60–70% in survival odds and about 0.8 cm in average height relative to owning no P-durables. On the other hand, television and car ownership appears to matter much less, especially for child survival.

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