Child Farm Labor : The Wealth Paradox

By S. Bhalotra, Christopher Heady. 2003

490 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of 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 economies 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 labor emerges from the poorest households. This article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor 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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6741861591001b648d84413e87d85f62b01a6111

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Citations in the corpus

Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster (2013, background): “…documenting household disinvestments in children’s human capital following income loss (Jacoby and Skoufias (1998); Strauss and Thomas (1998); Jensen (2000)), particularly disinvestments in girls’ human capital (Rose (1999); Bhalotra and Heady (2003); Maccini and Yang (2009); Chen (2011)).”
Child Labor and Household Wealth: Theory and Empirical Evidence of an Inverted-U (2007, unknown): “Therefore, the household’s optimization problem using (2) and (4) is as follows: max e (f(k, e + 1)) ce. ( 5 )”
The Global Child Labor Problem : What Do We Know and What Can We Do? (2003, background): “Another critique of poverty-based explanations of child labor comes from Bhalotra and Heady (2003), who have tried to show, using data for Ghana and Pakistan, that households that own (or operate) larger amounts of land tend to make their children work more.”
Child labor and agricultural shocks (2006, unknown): “This relationship has been put into question by a number of recent within-country studies (see inter alia Canagarajah and Nielsen, 1999; Grootaert and Patrinos, 1999; Boozer and Suri, 2001; Bhalotra and Heady, 2003).”
Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks (2006, background): “However, this may happen not only because the program brought to school children who would not have gone otherwise, but also because it prevented children exposed to shocks from dropping out.”
Schooling in Developing Countries: The Roles of Supply, Demand and Government Policy (2008, background): “50 For example, Bhalotra and Heady (2003) find an inverse relationship between land holdings and child time in school in Pakistan and Ghana, although the correlation is sensitive to covariates.”
Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor (2008, background): “Hence, the idea that the two are perfect substitutes is plausible for the most common types of work.”
Household Access to Microcredit and Child Work in Rural Malawi (2008, background): “As Binder and Scrogin (1999) put it, there are at least four reasons for the objectionability of child labor.”
The influence of market wages and parental history on child labour and schooling in Egypt (2006, background): “Most of these studies treat household income as exogenous—except for Bhalotra and Heady (2003) and Bhalotra (2001).”
Economics of child labour (2013, unknown): “(2010); Hou (2009); Moazam & Ajmal (1994); Khan and Ali (1991); Khan (2003); Ali & Khan (2004); Hazarika & Bedi (2003); Bhalotra (2004) and Iram & Fatima (2009).”
Why Should We Care About Child Labor? (2009, unknown): “However, this relationship has been put into question by a number of recent within-country studies (see inter alia Canagarajah and Nielsen [1999], Boozer and Suri [2001], and Bhalotra and Heady [2003]).”