Information and Communication Technologies, Agricultural Profitability, and Child Labor in Rural Peru

Diether Beuermann

No 211, OVE Working Papers from Inter-American Development Bank, Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE)

Abstract: We estimate the impact of access to information and communication technologies on agricultural profitability and child labor among isolated villages in rural Peru. We exploit an intervention that provided at least one public (satellite) payphone to 6,509 rural villages that did not previously have any kind of communication services (either landlines or cell phones). We show that the timing of the intervention was uncorrelated with baseline outcomes and exploit it using a panel dataset of treated villages. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find that profitability increased by 19.5 percent. Moreover, this income shock translated into a reduction in the likelihood of child market work of 13.7 percentage points and a reduction in child agricultural work of 9.2 percentage points. Overall, the evidence suggests a dominant income effect in the utilization of child labor.

Keywords: Information technology; rural development; child labor; Peru; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H43 Q12 Q16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://idbdocs.iadb.org/WSDocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=36152147 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:idb:ovewps:0211

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OVE Working Papers from Inter-American Development Bank, Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().