 Child Farm Labor: The Wealth ParadoxSonia Bhalotra and Christopher Heady Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK Abstract: This paper is motivated by the remarkable observation that children in land-rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land-poor households. The vast majority of working children in developing countries are in agricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by their families. Land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies and it is typically distributed very unequally. These facts challenge the common presumption that child labour emerges from the poorest households. This article suggests that this seeming paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labour and land. Credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox. These effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. The main result is that the 'wealth paradox' persists for girls in both countries whereas, for boys, it disappears after conditioning on other covariates. Keywords: child labour; land-rich households; wealth paradox (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:uobdis:03/553 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK |
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