Does Child Labor Lead to Vulnerable Employment in Adulthood? Evidence for Tanzania

Sara Burron and Gianna Giannelli

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between child labor and status in employment in adulthood. We aim to contribute to the literature that focuses on the obstacles to the formation early in life of the skills that allow people to avoid vulnerable employment and poverty. We focus on gender differences since the effects of child labor may differ greatly between boys and girls. Using the panel data survey for the Kagera region of Tanzania, we select children who were 7 to 15 years old in the 1990s and follow up with them in the first decade of the 2000s to study the consequences of child labor on their position in adult employment. We exploit the longitudinal structure of data to estimate linear probability models with fixed effects. We find that child labor is associated with vulnerable employment in adulthood and that this result is driven by the girls' sample. The analysis shows that negative adult employment effects arise when children who are younger than 11-12 work more than ten to twenty hours per week. Work on the household farm seems to have the largest negative effects for girls: the threshold lowers to 6 hours, and the probability of escaping from vulnerable employment decreases by approximately 20 to 40 percentage points for child laborers under 10.

Keywords: child labor; vulnerable employment; unpaid work; women's employment in developing countries; Kagera region of Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lab
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2018_28.rdf

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