Returns to farm child labor in Tanzania

Pierre André (), Esther Delesalle and Christelle Dumas ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Pierre André ()

No 502, FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland

Abstract: In developing countries, the opportunity costs of children’s time can significantly hinder universal education. This paper studies one of these opportunity costs: we estimate the agricultural productivity of children aged 10 to 15 years old using the LSMS-ISA panel survey in Tanzania. Since child labor can be endogenous, we exploit the panel structure of the data and instrument child labor with changes in the age composition of the household. One day of child work leads to an increase in production value by roughly US$0.89. Children enrolled in school work 26 fewer days than nonenrolled children. Compensating enrolled children for loss in income can be accomplished with monthly payments of $1.92. However, a complete simulation of a hypothetical conditional cash transfer shows that even $10/month transfers would fail to achieve universal school enrollment of children aged 10 to 15 years old.

Keywords: Child labor; Human capital investment; Conditional cash transfer; Farm household; Production function; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J3 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2019-04-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
Note: http://doc.rero.ch/record/324268
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doc.rero.ch/record/324268/files/WP_SES_502.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Returns to farm child labor in Tanzania (2021)
Working Paper: Returns to farm child labor in Tanzania (2021)
Working Paper: Returns to farm child labor in Tanzania (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fri:fribow:fribow00502

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://doc.rero.ch/record/324268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland Bd de Pérolles 90, CH-1700 Fribourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mustapha Obbad ().