Impact of International Migration and Remittances on Child Schooling and Child Work: The Case of Egypt

Egypt has been a major exporter of labor to oil-rich Arab countries. More recently, Egyptian migrants are increasingly heading to Europe. We assess the impact of international migration and remittances on child schooling and child work in Egypt. We use the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2006 (EL...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Elbadawy, Asmaa, Roushdy, Rania
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2010
Subjects
Children & youth
Migration
Remittances
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Summary:Egypt has been a major exporter of labor to oil-rich Arab countries. More recently, Egyptian migrants are increasingly heading to Europe. We assess the impact of international migration and remittances on child schooling and child work in Egypt. We use the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2006 (ELMPS 06). Since migration opportunities tend to be network-dependent, we use the intensity of migration on the village level based on the 2006 Egyptian Census to instrument for migration. We find remittances to have a strong positive effect on attendance for university-aged boys. Migration has a positive effect on the likelihood of attending school for young girls 6-11 and a mild effect on school attendance of university-aged girls.With respect to child work, migration and remittances were found to have a very large negative effect on young boys' market work. However, living in a migrant household seems to increase the likelihood of light domestic work for older boys. As for girls' work, remittances reduce long-duration domestic work.