Spillover Effects of Tobacco Farms on the Labor Supply, Education, and Health of Children: Evidence from Malawi

Fang Xia and Klaus Deininger

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 4, 1181-1202

Abstract: Using data from the Living Standards Measurement Study in Malawi, we examine the spillover effects of tobacco farms on children’s labor supply, education, and health. To address potential endogeneity, the share of tobacco farms in a community is instrumented by the change in tobacco buyers following termination of the intermediate buyer system. We find that, as tobacco cultivation is labor-intensive, children in communities with more tobacco growers spend more time as casual laborers and are less likely to advance to the next grade. Adverse health effects, measured by the likelihood of suffering from illnesses related to green tobacco sickness, are estimated to be larger than previously documented. This affects not only “working-age” children but also children too young to work on tobacco farms. Moreover, exposure to large-scale tobacco cultivation is estimated to reduce the height-for-age z-score of children aged 6–60 months. These findings highlight the importance of raising awareness and taking measures to protect children against green tobacco.

Keywords: Tobacco farm; child labor; education; health; Malawi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aaz011 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:ajagec:v:101:y:2019:i:4:p:1181-1202.

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().