Global financial crisis, credit access and children: Evidence from Tanzania

Hany Abdel-Latif (), Phil Murphy and Bazoumana Ouattara

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between the recent global financial crisis and child labour in Tanzania. Using the difference-in-difference methodological framework, we identify households' access to credit as a possible transmission channel of the financial crisis to child labour. Unlike most of the existing studies that employ self-reported shocks, we exploit the incidence of the global crisis as an exogenous shock to compare households that were credit recipients before the crisis with households that were not recipients of credit either prior to the crisis or in its immediate aftermath. To deal with possible bias from the endogeneity of access to credit, this study proposes a new instrument that considers the regional concentration of available micro finance institutions and the number of households' assets. Unlike instruments suggested by the existing literature, our proposed instrument incorporates information on both demand and supply sides of credit access irrespective of whether a household has actually received credit. To avoid the wealth effect which would violate the exogeniety condition, we suggest to count the number of the household's assets no matter how much value they possess. By doing so, our instrument utilizes information on how risk averse a household is and therefore their chances of making a successful loan application. The empirical results reveal that a negative shock on credit-recipient households is associated with a significant increase in child labour in Tanzania.

Keywords: Global Financial Crisis; Child Labour; Credit Access; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J43 J81 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/83577/1/MPRA_paper_83577.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:83577

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().