Why Does Child Labor Persist With Declining Poverty?

Abstract

We develop a dynamic overlapping generations model to highlight the role of income inequality in explaining the persistence of child labor under declining poverty. Differential investment in two forms of human capital-schooling and health-in the presence of inequality gives rise to a nonconvergent income distribution in the steady state characterized by multiple steady states of relative income with varying levels of education, health, and child labor. The child labor trap thus generated is shown to preserve itself despite rising per capita income. Policy recommendations include public provision of education targeted toward reducing schooling costs for the poor or raising the efficacy of public health infrastructure. (JEL I1, J2, O1, O2) * We are grateful to Jakob Madsen, Ranjan Ray, and Pushkar Maitra for their valuable inputs. We also thank Richard Barnett, Uwe Dulleck, Lionel Page, Elena del Rey Canteli, and the seminar participants of Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland and the 7th

Theorizing ‘Harm’ in Relation to Children’s Work

“…The discipline tends to work with datasets built on the back of ILO estimates of child labour, hazardous child labour and so on, often within the context of national surveys. From there, regressions are conducted to examine the interaction between, say, labour and poverty (for example, de Hoop and Rosati, 2014;Del Carpio et al, 2016;Sarkar and Sarkar, 2016) or labour and education (for example, Edmonds, 2008). But, by exploring children's work exclusively using the data and proxies that are established by the ILO, much is missed.…”

Children’s Work in African Agriculture

“…The discipline tends to work with datasets built on the back of ILO estimates of child labour, hazardous child labour and so on, often within the context of national surveys. From there, regressions are conducted to examine the interaction between, say, labour and poverty (for example, de Hoop and Sarkar and Sarkar, 2016) or labour and education (for example, Edmonds, 2008). But, by exploring children's work exclusively using the data and proxies that are established by the ILO, much is missed.…”

Counting the uncounted: The consequences of children's domestic chores for health and education in Ethiopia

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