Child labor handbook

Alessandro Cigno, Furio Rosati and Zafiris Tzannatos

No 25507, Social Protection Discussion Papers and Notes from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper surveys many aspects and issues of child labor, including its causes and effects as well as policies associated with it. Child labor has come to be considered an expression of poverty, both a cause and an effect of underdevelopment. Child labor cannot be viewed in isolation from educational, health, fertility, and technological issues; and is not necessarily an aberration but a rational household response to an adverse economic environment. With this in mind, the following proposition was supported - that forbidding children to work or making school attendance compulsory without changing the economic environment may, if effectively enforced, leave children worse off. There is a tendency to believe that income redistribution from the rich to the poor is more powerful for reducing child labor than a universal income rise. It is also indicated that child labor cuts across policy boundaries: health, education, labor market, capital security, criminal law, international peace keeping, income growth, and distribution all have a bearing on child labor. Therefore, reducing child labor cannot be regarded as just another policy issue.

Keywords: Child Labor; Street Children; Youth and Governance; Children and Youth; Health Monitoring&Evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-05-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentSer ... d/PDF/multi0page.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wbk:hdnspu:25507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Social Protection Discussion Papers and Notes from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aaron F Buchsbaum ().