Child farm labour: the wealth paradox

Sonia Bhalotra and Christopher Heady

No 24088, Social Protection Discussion Papers and Notes from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper is motivated by the 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. We suggest 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. We model these effects and estimate the model on data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. A striking finding of the paper is that, after controlling for household consumption and other covariates, the wealth paradox persists for girls but, for boys in both countries, it vanishes.

Keywords: Street Children; Environmental Economics&Policies; Economic Theory&Research; Health Monitoring&Evaluation; Children and Youth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-10-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox (2003)
Working Paper: Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox (2003)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:hdnspu:24088

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