Socioeconomic inequalities in child malnutrition in Egypt

In this paper, we study the evolution of socioeconomic inequalities in child malnutrition in Egypt between 2000 and 2014. Unlike most of the literature, we go beyond the usual dichotomous framework of stunting incidence and adopt a continuous indicator approach of child stunting. We use Wagstaff (J Health Econ 21:627–641, 2002) health achievement index to measure health shortfall as indicator of the social impact of child stunting. In order to analyze the determinants of stunting shortfall, we derive the expression of the recentered influence function of the health shortfall index. We also use this result in a recentered influence function regression framework and perform a Oxaca–Blinder type of decomposition of the change in stunting shortfall during that period. We find that stunting shortfall did not change significantly during that period. However, the Oxaca–Blinder decomposition indicates that the endowment effect would have decreased significantly stunting shortfall between 2000 and 2014. Unfortunately, the adverse economic conditions implied a structural effect in the opposite direction.