This paper examines the contextual and community-level determinants of multidimensional womens empowerment in Egypt, while accounting for the usual individual and household level factors typically included in studies of womens empowerment. The paper analyzes two dimensions of womens empowerment: the decision-making and the mobility dimensions by means of two indices constructed from various survey questions relating to these dimensions. We use data from the Population Census of 2006 and the Demographic Health Survey of 2008 to construct community and governorate-level contextual variables to complement the individual-level data we obtain from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey of 2012 (ELMPS 2012). In line with the literature, the determinants that are relevant to the decision-making and mobility dimensions of womens empowerment turned out to be quite different, confirming that empowerment is a multi- dimensional phenomenon, with women relatively empowered in some aspects of their lives but not in others. Moreover, our results show that context plays an important role in determining womens empowerment in Egypt after controlling for a variety of individual and household-level characteristics. These results highlight the importance of viewing womens empowerment, and hence development as social and normative transformations rather than as just resulting from shifts in individual conditions, attitudes and behaviors. Thus, empowering Egyptian women will require changing community norms and values about gender relations rather than simply providing greater educational and employment opportunities for women

It is well-established that Arab labor markets share certain common characteristics, including an oversized public sector, high unemployment for educated youth, weak private sector dependent on government welfare for their survival, rapid growth in educational attainment, but much of it focused on the pursuit of formal credentials rather than productive skills, and low and stagnant female labor force participation rates. I argue in this paper that all of these features can be explained by the deep and persistent dualism that characterizes Arab labor markets as a result of the use of labor markets by Arab regimes as tool of political appeasement in the context of the authoritarian bargain social contract that they have struck with their citizens in the post-independence period. Even as fiscal crises have long destabilized these arrangements in most non-oil Arab countries, culminating in the dramatic political upheavals of the Arab spring revolutions, the enduring legacy of dualism will continue to strongly shape the production and deployment of human capital in Arab economies for some time. This will undoubtedly pose serious challenges to any efforts to transform these economies into dynamic, rapidly growing and more equitable globally competitive economies.

Integrated census microdata constitute a new resource for social science research and policy making. The IPUMS-International project (www.ipums.org/international) is a global initiative in cooperation with national statistical authorities world-wide to anonymize, integrate and disseminate samples of census microdata. Extracts adapted to the specific research needs of each user are distributed as ASCII textfiles along with the corresponding metadata without charge via the Internet. Researchers analyze the data using their own software and hardware. This paper offers a brief over-view of the project and invites official statistical agencies in Africa to obtain additional information about participating in the IPUMS initiative by emailing the principal author of this paper. To illustrate one possible application for evidence-based policy making with respect to the Millennium Development Goals, microdata from the 2000 census of Mexico are used to measure progress toward the attainment of universal primary education and the elimination of gender inequities in access to primary education.