Does Child Labor Decline with Improving Economic Status?

@article{Edmonds2003DoesCL,  title={Does Child Labor Decline with Improving Economic Status?},  author={Eric V. Edmonds},  journal={The Journal of Human Resources},  year={2003},  volume={XL},  pages={77 - 99},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:13971652}}
Between 1993 and 1997, child labor in Vietnam declined by nearly 30 percent while the country’s GDP grew by nearly 9 percent per year on average. Using a simple, nonparametric decomposition, I investigate the relationship between improvements in per capita expenditure and child labor with a panel data set that spans this episode of growth in Vietnam. Improvements in per capita expenditure can explain 80 percent of the decline in child labor that occurs in households whose expenditures improve… 

252 Citations

Economic Growth and Child Labor in Low Income Economies

GLM|LIC Working Paper No. 11 | April 2016 Economic Growth and Child Labor in Low Income Economies 264 million children work in the world today. 64 percent are in activities that satisfy legal…

Household Choices of Child Labor and Schooling

This paper argues that conflicting results from previous literature—related to the effect of economic conditions on child labor—derive from different income and substitution effects implicit in…

Child Labor in the Global Economy

Few issues in developing countries draw as much popular attention as child labor. This paper begins by quantifying the extent and main characteristics of child labor. It then considers the evidence…

Relative Affluence and Child Labor—Explaining a Paradox

Some micro level empirical studies found child labor incidence increasing even with improvement in the economic conditions of the poor. This paper provides a possible explanation as to why increase…

Household Choices of Child Labor and Schooling: A Simple Model with Application to Brazil

This paper argues that conflicting results from previous literature—related to the effect of economic conditions on child labor—derive from different income and substitution effects implicit in…

Economic Growth, Poverty, and Household Welfare in Vietnam

Viet Nam is an economic success story - it transformed itself from a country in the 1980s as one of the poorest in the world, to a country in the 1990s with one of the world's highest growth rates.…

Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor

Does child labor decrease as household income rises? This question has important implications for the design of policy on child labor. This paper focuses on a program of unconditional cash transfers…

Child labor and the minimum wage: Evidence from India

Local Labor Demand and Child Labor

This paper uses micro data from the Brazilian PNAD between 1981 and 2002 to ascertain the role that local labor demand – proxied by male adult employment in the area of residence - plays in shaping…

Child Labor and Household Wealth: Theory and Empirical Evidence of an Inverted-U

Some studies on child labor have shown that greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the…
...

53 References

Does Child Labor Decline with Improving Economic Status

From 1993 to 1997, GDP per capita in Vietnam grew by between 6 and 7 percent annually. Child labor declined by 28 percent over this period. Using a simple, nonparametric decomposition, I investigate…

Inequality, Productivity and Child Labor: Theory and Evidence

A recent theoretical literature has linked reductions in income inequality to reductions in child labor in countries that are relatively well-off, but has not explored how income distribution affects…

Child Labor, Fertility and Economic Growth

This paper explores the evolution of child labor, fertility, and human capital in the process of development. In early stages of development the economy is in a development trap where child labor is…

State Child Labor Laws and the Decline of Child Labor

Between 1880 and 1930, the occupation rate of children age 10 to 15 fell by over 75%. This paper examines whether state laws restricting the employment of child labor contributed to this decline.…

Child Labor, Crop Shocks, and Credit Constraints

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and…

The Decline of Child Labor in the U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry: Law or Economics?

Child labor in the U.S. economy declined significantly between 1880 and 1920. This case study of the fruit and vegetable canning industry examines variations in laws, technology, and income across…

Child labor versus educational attainment Some evidence from Latin America

It was found that labor force participation is non-trivial among those below the legal working age or supposed to be in school and the fact that a child is working reduces his or her educational attainment by about 2 years of schooling relative to the control group of non-working children.

Child Labor and Schooling Decisions in Ghana

In this paper we investigate the choices involved in the tradeoff between a child’s labor outside of household work and their schooling hours from a sample of data from Ghana in the late 1980’s.…

Is Child Labor Inefficient?

We build a model of child labor and study its implications for welfare. We assume that there is a trade‐off between child labor and the accumulation of human capital. Even if parents are altruistic…
...

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers