EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Education, Labour Market and Health Consequences of Child Labour

Rajeev Dehejia, Roberta Gatti () and Kathleen Beegle

No 4443, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Though there is a large literature on the determinants of child labour and many initiatives aimed at combating this phenomenon, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labour for socioeconomic outcomes such as education, occupational choice, wages, and health. Using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy, we evaluate the effect of child labour participation on outcomes over a five-year horizon. We find significant negative impacts of child labour on subsequent school participation and educational attainment. On the other hand, we find that those who worked as children are likely to earn a higher wage as young adults. This effect more than fully offsets the foregone earnings due to reduced schooling, particularly for girls. We find no significant effects of child labour on several indicators of health. This evidence in part accounts for why child labour is such a pervasive phenomenon and suggests that the case against child labour requires both future increases in the returns to schooling (i.e., beyond the five year horizon encompassed by our data set) and that parents are able to borrow (or internally fund) the investment in schooling.

Keywords: Child labour; Returns to education; Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4443 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:4443

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4443

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:4443