Stalled Fertility Decline in Egypt: A Multilevel Analysis

Elena Ambrosetti, Università La Sapienza

Fertility evolution in the Egyptian governorates has not been homogeneous along the time. We can notice a huge fertility difference between Lower and Upper Egypt and also between urban and rural zones. To explain regional differences in fertility, we will consider the individual characteristics and the social structure where women live. The statistical method that we will use is the multilevel analysis, it is applied to hierarchical data sets where individuals are the basic unit of the analysis and they are aggregated in one or several hierarchical structures. In the multilevel modeling, a three-level hierarchy in the data will be considered: individual, PSU, and governorate. We will use 3 sources of data: 1)the individual questionnaire of the 2000 Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) 2000, 2)PSU with information about Global Positioning System (GPS)locators and governorate-level indicators available in the 2003 Egypt Human Development Report based on estimated values for 2001.