This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest because they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive, and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a 10% increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller, not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost, we argue that the social returns of adult literacy programs are substantial.

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The link between poverty and child labor has Moreover, they find evidence of a gender gap in child traditionally been regarded as well established. But labor linked to poverty. Girls as a group (as well as recent research has questioned the validity of this link, across urban, rural, and poverty subsamples) are claiming that poverty is not a main determinant of child consistently found to be more likely to engage in harmful labor. child labor than boys. This gender gap may reflect Starting from the premise that child labor is not cultural norms (an issue that calls for further research). necessarily harmful, Blunch and Verner analyze the The incidence of child labor increases with age, determinants of harmful child labor, viewed as child especially for girls. labor that directly conflicts with children's accumulation In Ghana there are structural differences-across of human capital, in an effort to identify the most gender, between rural and urban locations, and across vulnerable groups. Identifying these groups might enable poverty quintiles of households-in the processes policymakers to take appropriate action. underlying child labor. The authors reinstate the positive relationship between poverty and child labor. This paper-a joint product of Human Development 3, Africa Technical Families, and the Economic Policy Sector Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region-is part of a larger effort in the Bank to investigate and understand the processes underlying child labor. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank,

There is little evidence on the size of the union wage premium in developing economies. The article uses a matched employer-employee data set for Ghana and adopts a quantile regression approach that allows the effects of unionization to vary across the conditional wage distribution. It is shown that if there are intrafirm differences in unionization, there does appear to be a premium among poorer paid workers in the formal sector. Although this cannot be given a causal interpretation, it suggests important issues about how unions may affect one part of the labor market.