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The impact of minimum age of employment regulation on child labor and schooling *
Abstract
Promoting minimum age of employment regulation has been a centerpiece in child labor policy for the last 15 years. If enforced, minimum age regulation would change the age profile of paid child employment. Using micro-data from 59 mostly low-income countries, we observe that age can explain less than one percent of the variation in child participation in paid employment. In contrast, child-invariant household attributes account for 63 percent of the variation in participation in paid employment. While age may explain little of the variation in paid employment, minimum age of employment regulation could simultaneously impact time allocation. We do not observe evidence consistent with enforcement of minimum age regulation in any country examined, although light work regulation appears to have been enforced in one country.
JEL Codes
J22, O15, J88, K42
... Therefore, it is more considered as a state of being without parents, then as state of mind (Huijsmans 2015). The reason is that the children´s route could be planned, discussed and supported by parents and they also relied on children´ earnings (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012;Whitehead, Hashim, and Iversen 2007). ...
... Social agency is the paramount concept, it enables an understanding of how spatial, economic, familial, cultural, political, social, structural and other contextual factors are constructed and limit the lives of young people (Fresnoza-Flot and Nagasaka 2015b). However, research of independent child migration and unaccompanied minors concentrates more on the impact of migration on young people lives and their social agency is therefore influenced by outer conditions that affect them (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012;Huijsmans 2017;Jiménez-Alvarez 2015b;Whitehead, Hashim, and Iversen 2007). Thus young people are then described by determinative actions. ...
... "Left-behind children" and "children migrated as part of a family unit" are usually seen as younger then "unaccompanied minors" or "independent childmigrants" who might be 18-years-old or slightly younger. However, chronological age can not be claimed as social age (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012;Iversen 2002). The intersection between chronological age and social category is often blurred and without context to behaviour -chronological age does not express meaningful processes, especially when social age is based on everyday interaction (Huijsmans 2015). ...
... 3 This could also happen if children shifted away from the regulated sector no longer bring in external resources. Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) define three necessary conditions for the sector reallocation following a ban in the regulated sector to be neutral in terms of overall child employment: "adults" (i.e., parents or siblings above the minimum age) can move freely between the household and the regulated sector (competitive adult labor markets); adults and children are perfect substitutes subject to a productivity shifter (substitution axiom); and the household can freely substitute adult and child labor between productive tasks inside the household (non-saturation). ...
... SeeEdmonds (2007) for a review of the links between household poverty and child labor. minimum age regulations in contemporary developing countries was conducted by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012). Using data from 59 low-income countries, they showed an absence of discontinuity in child participation in paid employment around the legal minimum age, suggesting that the enforcement of such restrictions is weak at best. ...
... The minimum age component laid the legal framework for combating child labor even before the ratification of International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions C138 on the Minimum Age of Employment (in 2001) and C182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (in 2000). While many countries had adopted minimum age legislation without devoting the necessary resources to credible enforcement (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012), it can be argued that Brazil was in a better position, especially given its aforementioned comprehensive strategy for combating child labor (Fortin, Lacroix, and Drolet 2004). It also benefited from an operational system of labor inspections to detect firms employing children and fine them if labor conditions were not appropriate or the legal age not respected. ...
... In principle, these laws could decrease child labor, if applied uniformly across different types of activities, or lead to its reallocation towards unregulated sectors. Overall, there is little evidence that minimum employment age regulations have any effect at all, and in particular that they are influencing child engagement in paid work (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012). There are two main reasons for this observation. ...
... may also happen if children shifted away from the regulated sector no longer bring external resources. Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) define three necessary conditions for the sector reallocation following a ban in the regulated sector to be neutral on overall child employment: "adults" (i.e. parents or siblings above the minimum age) can move freely between the household and the regulated sector (competitive adult labor markets); adults and children are perfect substitutes subject to a productivity shifter (substitution axiom); the household can freely substitute adult and child labor between productive tasks inside the household (non-saturation). ...
... The explanation pertains to a fall in child wages relative to adults' in the industrial, regulated sector, which leads budget constrained households to resort to more work by siblings -or by under-minimum age children themselves when there is no possible sibling substitution. The most comprehensive study on minimum age regulations in contemporary developing countries is suggested by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012). Using data from 59 low-income countries, they show an absence of discontinuity in child participation in paid-employment around the legal minimum age, suggesting that the enforcement of such restrictions is weak at best. ...
This study presents new evidence on the effects of minimum age regulations obtained from a natural experiment. In 1998, a constitutional reform in Brazil changed the minimum working age from 14 to 16. The reform was the legislative counterpart of a broad set of measures taken by a government strongly committed to eliminating child labor. This article investigates the role of the minimum working age in this context. The setting allows for improvements upon past approaches based on comparing employment rates of children at different ages. A discontinuity in treatment is exploited, namely the fact that only children who turned 14 after the enactment date (mid-December 1998) are banned from work. According to regression discontinuity and difference-in-discontinuity designs, the null hypothesis of no overall effect of the ban cannot be rejected. Throughout the methods and specifications, an employment effect in a confidence interval of (in percentage points) is found. A detailed heterogeneity analysis is performed and provides suggestive evidence of diminishing child labor trends in regions characterized by higher labor inspection intensity, which is interpreted as a trace of there being a law. However, contrary to what has been claimed in recent studies, the law seems not to have produced sizeable effects overall, at least in the short run. Power calculations and extensive sensitivity checks support these conclusions.
... In very poor regions, such bans may not be effective if households depend on the child's income or if children need to work to avoid hunger ( Basu 1999 ;Doepke and Zilibotti 2009 ). 3 Indeed, several studies show that poverty is the main reason for parents to rely on child labor, leading them to prioritize current consumption and trade off between child labor and schooling, i.e., future earnings ( Basu and Van 1998 ;Baland and Robinson 2000 ;Ranjan 2001 ;Cigno, Rosati, and Guarcello 2002 ;Jafarey and Lahiri 2002 ;Horowitz and Wang 2004 ;Edmonds 2007 ). The empirical evidence on child labor bans in developing countries shows minimal impact due to low enforcement or detection methods ( Edmonds and Shrestha 2012 ). 4 For example, Piza and Souza (2017) find in Brazil that a shift in the minimum working age from 14 to 16 decreases the labor-force participation for 14-year-old boys in the short-run but has no impact on earnings or work in the long-run. ...
... In contrast, for the same ban, Bargain and Boutin (2021) find no overall significant impacts in the short run, 5 but suggestive evidence that child labor decreases in areas where labor inspections were high. This finding is reinforced by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) , who find no impact of the minimum working age on child time allocation in 59 low-income countries. In contrast, Bharadwaj, Lakdawala, and Li (2020) study a law against child labor in India and find that the ban led to an overall increase in child labor due to a decrease in child wages relative to adult wages. ...
This paper investigates the effect of a unique child labor ban regulation on employment and school enrollment. The ban, implemented in Mexico in 2015, increased the minimum working age from 14 to 15, introduced restrictions to employing underage individuals, and imposed stricter penalties for violation of the law. Our identification strategy relies on a DiD approach that exploits the date of birth as a natural cutoff to assign individuals into treatment and control groups. The ban led to a decrease in the probability to work by 1.2 percentage points, resembling a 16 percent decrease in the probability to work relative to the pre-reform mean, and an increase in the probability of being enrolled in school by 2.2 percentage points for the treatment group. These results are driven by a reduction in employment in paid work, and in the manufacturing and services sectors. The effects are persistent several years after the ban.
... First, as far as we are aware of, ours is the first paper to investigate the causal effect of increases in the minimum legal working age on mortality rates. Previous studies have examined the effect of both child labor laws and compulsory schooling laws on short-term outcomes such as educational attainment and child labor (Goldin and Katz 2011;Lleras-Muney 2002;Edmonds and Shrestha 2012). 5 In addition, related literature analyzed the effect of education on many health outcomes and health behaviors using changes in compulsory schooling laws (Oreopoulos 2006;Clark and Royer 2013;Lleras-Muney 2005;Meghir et al. 2018;Albouy and Lequien 2009;Kemptner et al. 5 Lleras-Muney (2002) and Goldin and Katz (2011) examine the effects that compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 have on educational attainment in the USA. ...
... While Lleras-Muney (2002) finds that legislation increased the educational attainment of individuals at the lowest percentile in the distribution of education, Goldin and Katz (2011) report that the reform has only a positive but modest impact on secondary schooling rates. Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) analyze the effect of a statutory minimum school-leaving age on child labor and schooling in 59 mostly low-income countries. However, they find that minimum age regulations are barely enforced in such countries. ...
In 1980, a few years after its democratization process, Spain raised the minimum working age from 14 to 16, while the compulsory education age remained at 14. This reform changed the within-cohort incentives to remain in the educational system. We use a difference-in-differences approach, where our treated and control individuals only differ in their month of birth, to analyze the gender asymmetries in mortality generated by this change. The reform decreased mortality at ages 14–29 among men by 6.4% and women by 8.9%, mainly from a reduction in deaths due to traffic accidents. However, the reform also increased mortality for women ages 30–45 by 7%. This is driven by increases in HIV mortality, as well as by diseases related to the nervous and circulatory systems. We show that women’s health habits deteriorated as a consequence of the reform, while this was not the case for men. The gender differences in the impact of the reform on smoking and drinking should be understood in the context of the gender equalization process that affected women were experiencing when the reform took place. All in all, these patterns help explain the narrowing age gap in life expectancy between women and men in many developed countries while, at the same time, they provide important policy implications for middle-income countries that are undergoing those gender equalization processes right now.
... Psacharopoulos' (1997) analysis revealed significant partici-pation in the labour market among children who should be prevented from it by compulsory education or working age legislation. Similar evidence was found in Brazil by Bargain and Boutin (2017) and in data from 59 countries including Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012). Legislation often fails in eliminating child labour in its entirety as legislation does not cover the entire economy or only applies to specific activities or sectors (Boockmann, 2010). ...
... Using a two-sector model of employment in which legislation completely eliminates child labour, Basu (2005) found that a ban via minimum age legislation in this model instead pushed children into unregulated work. There are three conditions identified by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012) as necessary for sector reallocation to be neutral after a ban in the regulated sector. Firstly, that child and adult labour are exact substitutes subject to a productivity shifter (based on Basu and Van's (1998) 'substitution axiom'). ...
Participation in child labour, in both household and non-household activities, gender effects and low educational attainment remain challenges for countries in Latin America. Through hierarchical linear modelling of data from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), this study seeks to explore the current cross-country trends in the relationship between educational attainment, child labour and gender. While non-household labour is found to have an effect, as per statistical significance and the magnitude, on educational achievement across all Latin American countries; participation in household labour is significant in only two countries (Peru and Uruguay). Girls are found to underperform compared to boys by a significant margin across Latin America. The later part of the study seeks to examine the interaction effects of gender and participation in labour activities. Results show that gender has no moderating effect, suggesting that participation in work itself or workspace (household or non-household) does not influence or contribute to gender inequality in education outcomes. The explanatory factors for gender inequality in education outcomes are potentially rooted in a different sphere of influence which needs to be deciphered through deeper empirical investigation.
... An effect of focussing on age rather than harm is that children are removed from bad working conditions, only to return to the same bad conditions a few years later. A recent study of 59 countries by economists Eric Edmonds and Maheshwor Shrestha (2012) showed failed to find evidence that regulations based on minimum-age standards significantly reduced work outside the home or affected schooling (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012). Another recent study has argued that bans in India on child labour in the 1980s sometimes drove children into illegitimate work, which was less well paid, resulting in children doing more work to meet family needs (Bharadwaj et al. 2013). ...
... An effect of focussing on age rather than harm is that children are removed from bad working conditions, only to return to the same bad conditions a few years later. A recent study of 59 countries by economists Eric Edmonds and Maheshwor Shrestha (2012) showed failed to find evidence that regulations based on minimum-age standards significantly reduced work outside the home or affected schooling (Edmonds and Shrestha 2012). Another recent study has argued that bans in India on child labour in the 1980s sometimes drove children into illegitimate work, which was less well paid, resulting in children doing more work to meet family needs (Bharadwaj et al. 2013). ...
... 114-135), es una reivindicación que los propios niños hacen valer. La reivindicación es el resultado de la experiencia de los niños trabajadores de que las leyes y políticas existentes para protegerlos de la explotación rara vez, o nunca, han contribuido a mejorar su situación, sino que en realidad han aumentado su discrimina ción y vulnerabilidad (véase Bourdillon et al., 2010;Edmonds y Maheshwor, 2012;Bharadwaj et al., 2013;Putnick y Bornstein, 2015). ...
Los niños trabajadores no sólo son discriminados por ser todavía niños, sino también porque viven de una forma que no está prevista en el modelo de infancia imperante en el Norte Global: trabajan. Su discriminación se manifiesta, entre otras cosas, en que su trabajo no es reconocido y en que son más explotados económicamente que los adultos, así como en que se les niegan los derechos laborales y la participación en todos los asuntos que les afectan como niños trabajadores. Para contrarrestar su discriminación, el artículo aboga por repensar tanto la infancia como el trabajo. En este contexto, se refiere al concepto de adultismo o adultocentrismo como característica fundamental de una sociedad en la que los adultos determinan cómo deben vivir las personas jóvenes y en la que se impide a los niños participar de forma significativa. El artículo explora las formas particulares de discriminación contra los niños trabajadores y describe las maneras específicas en que éstos lo experimentan y se resisten a ella.
... Nigeria, as an ILO member, has ratified key conventions that establish labour standards. International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 138 sets minimum age standards for employment, generally prohibiting the employment of individuals under 15, with exceptions for light work and apprenticeships starting at age 13(Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012). This convention permits nonhazardous apprenticeships for individuals aged 15 and above, aligning with the developmental needs of young workers. ...
The Igbo Apprenticeship Model, known locally as the "Igba Boi" system, which have span over five centuries before the precolonial times serves as cornerstone of entrepreneurship and economic development within the Igbo community of SouthEast Nigeria. This traditional practice involves a young male apprentice, referred to as "Nwa Boyi," being trained under the guidance of a master trader or entrepreneur. The apprenticeship model is of great economic advantage to both the local Igbo community, the family of the young male apprentice who spend years learning business tactics and skills. Despite its significant socioeconomic contributions, the "Igba Boi" system operates largely outside formal legal frameworks, raising questions about the contractual status and legal protections of the apprentices. This study examines how the Igbo apprenticeship model ("Nwa Boyi") fits within SouthEast Nigeria and its legal framework. Findings reveal challenges in contractual enforcement due to informal agreements. Using sociocultural theory, legal pluralism, and contract theory, the research highlights gaps between customary practices and statutory law, suggesting the need for legal reforms.
... To the extent that demand-side forces are individuals and supply side forces are institutions, people may naturally be more inclined to think of individual persons as having 18 Presumably, the child labor law could have worked better if fines were so severe and strictly enforced that enough employers would not hire a child, no matter how low the wage. In general, economists tend to favor reducing child labor by other means such as: boosting the living standards of poor households, allowing them greater access to credit when they need it, or implementing educational reforms (such as subsidizing school attendance, improving the schools, and so on; Basu, 1999;Basu & Tzannatos, 2003;Brown et al., 2003;Edmonds & Pavcnik, 2005;Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012;Lopez-Calva, 2001;Moehling, 1999;cf. Lleras-Muney, 2002, on the effect of work permit laws in the United States on schooling and cf. ...
Psychologists often posit relatively straightforward attitude-behavior links. They also often study cultural arrangements as manifestations of attitudes and values writ large. However, we illustrate some difficulties with scaling up attitude-behavior principles from the individual-level to the cultural-level: Historical attitudes and values can lead to the creation of intermediating institutions, whose value-expressive functions may be at odds with the behavioral outcomes they produce. Through “institutional inversion,” institutions may facilitate rather than inhibit stigmatized behavior. Here we examine attitudes and behavior related to
debt, contrast historically Protestant versus Catholic places, and show how cultural attitudes against debt may lead to the creation of institutions that increase—rather than decrease—borrowing. Historical anti-debt attitudes in Protestant places have led to contemporary households in Protestant cultures now carrying the highest debt loads. We discuss the importance of supply side factors, attitude --> institutions --> behavior causal chains, and some blind spots that lead to unintended consequences.
... When a child labour ban is perfectly enforced, it forces firms to withdraw children from work. However, governments in countries where child labour is present often do not have enough capacity and resources to perfectly enforce regulations on child employment (Edmonds and Shrestha (2012)). According to a simple model by Basu (2005), when bans are imperfectly enforced, they raise the cost of hiring children, as employers anticipate facing stiff fines or other penalties when caught using child labour. ...
This paper builds an overlapping generations household economy model where child labour is present. Child schooling is determined by parental altruism. The degree of parental altruism is determined by the level of schooling of the parent. A more educated parent has a greater willingness to invest in the human capital formation of the child. These differences in the preferences of parents towards their offspring’s schooling have significant effects on the long-run dynamics of schooling. The dynamics of schooling exhibit the possibility of the existence of a child labour trap. If the economy is trapped in an inefficient equilibrium, increasing the child wage and the adult unskilled wage can help the economy get rid of the child labour trap. In this paper, we also study the efficacy of child labour ban and education subsidy in enhancing schooling and reducing child labour. We find that education subsidy is always likely to increase child schooling and reduce child labour. But banning child labour will increase schooling if the adult wage exceeds the sum of schooling cost and subsistence consumption expenditure. Once the economy reaches the advanced stage, banning child labour is desirable to take the stable equilibrium to full schooling equilibrium, but before that, banning child labour is not desirable.
... For example, in the context of the late nineteenth Century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Moehling (1999) found no evidence that changes in minimum working age laws focused on industry exerted a statistically significant effect on the decline in child labour during this period across the United States. This is also confirmed by the experience of today's developing economies, where child labour laws seem to explain little of the variation in paid employment of children across countries (Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012). ...
The “traditional view” on the historical decline of child labour has emphasised the role of the approval of effective child labour (minimum working age) laws. Since then, the importance of alternative key driving factors such as schooling, demography, household income or technology has been highlighted. While historically leading countries such as England and industrial labour have been studied, peripheral Europe and a full participation rate also including agriculture and services have received limited research attention. The contribution of this paper is to provide a first empirical explanation for the child labour decline observed in a European peripheral country like Portugal using long historical yearly data. For doing so, we use long series of Portugal’s child labour participation rate and several candidate explanatory factors. We implement cointegration techniques to relate child labour with its main drivers. We find that not only factors related to the “traditional view” were important for the Portuguese case. In fact, a mixture of legislation, schooling, demography, income, and technological factors seem to have contributed to the sustainable fall of Portugal’s child labour. Hence, explanations for observed child labour decline seem to differ by country and context, introducing a more nuanced view of the existing literature.
... However, this is not required by our empirical approach -the point is that the 1986 law tightened the rules on child labor overall and brought uniformity and awareness to the code. A related concern stems from recent work by Edmonds and Shrestha (2012). They document that minimum age regulations are rarely enforced across a broad set of developing countries by showing a lack of discontinuity in labor force participation around the minimum age. ...
p>Although bans against child labor are a ubiquitous policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence on their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India’s landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined whom the ban applied to, we show that the relative probability of child employment increases and child wages (relative to adult wages) decrease after the ban. Our main specification relies on comparing changes in work probabilities over time for children of the same age but with siblings who are rendered either eligible or ineligible for legal work when the ban is implemented. The increases in the probability of economic activity are largest for children (i) in areas where the industries targeted by the ban play a larger role in local labor markets, (ii) in areas where the probability of employer inspections is higher, and (iii) in families that are poorer. These results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. We also find decreases in child participation in schooling (for younger children only) and no economically meaningful change in household outcomes like assets or calorie intake.
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... So far it suggests that its short-run effect on youth labor and schooling depends on the context. This is so due to the weak enforcement of the law and the prevalence of informal labor market and the different types of work such as non-paid work, family farmers, etc. (e.g., Edmonds & Shresta, 2012). ...
Survival and growth-oriented entrepreneurs follow qualitatively different logics. In this chapter we retrace the scattered previous theorization of this distinction and present a consolidated set of key characteristics of the two types of enterprises, enriched by our own observations in the field. Our main purpose is to typify the different rationalities of the two groups of entrepreneurs. Secondly, we argue that because most existing interventions are based on the implicit assumption that all entrepreneurs are growth-oriented, they often fail to address the specific needs of survivalists. Finally, we outline an intervention rationale more attuned to the logic of survival entrepreneurs.
... Even though there is a widespread belief that minimum age legislation can protect children from exploitative and harmful work, there is no adequate research that links exploitation, hazards, and harm on the one hand, with age and employment on the other; however, there are numerous case studies indicating that children's well-being can be harmed by being removed from work due to minimum age standards (see, Bharadwaj et al., ;Bourdillon, 2017;Bourdillon et al., 2011;Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012). Studies that look at how policy and intervention in regard to children's engagement in work holistically influence children's wellbeing are rare since it is often considered that children gain from being stopped from working. ...
This study explores the experiences of school going children who combine work and schooling in the Ekumfi-Narkwa fishing and farming community in the Central Region of Ghana. These children participate in works in their community as part of internalising their community’s norms and values, raise income and gain some skills to support their parents in a sustainable manner. The study employed a qualitative approach involving the use of in-depth interviews and participant/non-participant observations to elicit responses from the children. For these children, their tasks as fisher folks and farmers are regarded as purposeful for their everyday survival in their community. They consider the effort they put in their work as a way of reproducing inter-generational orders underpinned by strong ethical connotations. The children speak about how they gain their identities, self-esteem and skills through the work they do, the beneficial nature of the works they engage in and the ethical dimensions of engagement are emphasised. However, for their future, the children have dreams of other types of works that they think could be more fulfilling based on their level of education.
... In addition to this, widespread corruption in government and law enforcement is seen as a severe issue aggravating the problem of child labour" (Verisk Maplecroft, 2019, p. 8). A common denominator in countries where child labour is prevalent, is that their governments rarely have the capacity and resources to effectively enforce regulations on child employment (Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012). ...
We measure the extent to which European trade policies impact child labour in other countries and propose trade policy options based on the economic development and child labour status of trade partners.
... Furthermore, given that these children are required to meet their basic need and costs of schooling, loss of income caused by removing children from work leave them worse off, and caused them to be involved in a work that could be even hazardous and interfere with school and other activities [10,17,18]. Likewise, an attempt to ban child labour through enforcement of minimum employment age also could not yield desired results for all children, as most working children in Africa are involved in agriculture and informal sectors where such mechanism is less likely to be effective [19]. ...
Child labour remains a prevalent global concern, and progress toward eradicating harmful children’s work appears to have stalled in the African continent and henceforth, integrated social policy intervention is still required to address the problem. Among several forms of social policy interventions, stomach infrastructure (i.e., in-kind and/or cash transfers) have been a key policy approach to support vulnerable families to lighten households’ resources burden, which forces them to consider child labour as a coping strategy. There is growing evidence on the impacts of these programs in child labour. However, this evidence is often mixed regarding children’s work outcomes, and the existing studies hardly describe such heterogeneous outcomes from the child-sensitive approach. To this end, a systematic literature search was conducted for studies in African countries. From 743 references retrieved in this study, 27 studies were included for the review, and a narrative approach has been employed to analyse extracted evidence. Results from the current study also demonstrate a mixed effect of in-kind and cash transfers for poor households on child labour decisions. Hence, the finding from the current review also demonstrates a reduced participation of children in paid and unpaid work outside the household due to in-kind and cash transfers to poor households, but children’s time spent in economic and non-economic household labour and farm and non-farm labour, which are detrimental to child health and schooling, has been reported increasing due to the program interventions. The question remains how these programs can effectively consider child-specific and household-related key characteristics. To this end, a child-sensitive social protection perspective has been applied in this study to explain these mixed outcomes to inform policy design.
... To the extent that demand-side forces are individuals and supply side forces are institutions, people may naturally be more inclined to think of individual persons as having 18 Presumably, the child labor law could have worked better if fines were so severe and strictly enforced that enough employers would not hire a child, no matter how low the wage. In general, economists tend to favor reducing child labor by other means such as: boosting the living standards of poor households, allowing them greater access to credit when they need it, or implementing educational reforms (such as subsidizing school attendance, improving the schools, and so on; Basu, 1999;Basu & Tzannatos, 2003;Brown et al., 2003;Edmonds & Pavcnik, 2005;Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012;Lopez-Calva, 2001;Moehling, 1999;cf. Lleras-Muney, 2002, on the effect of work permit laws in the United States on schooling and cf. ...
Psychologists often posit relatively straightforward attitude-behavior links. They also often study cultural arrangements as manifestations of attitudes and values writ large. However, we illustrate some difficulties with scaling up attitude-behavior principles from the individual-level to the cultural-level: Historical attitudes and values can lead to the creation of intermediating institutions, whose value-expressive functions may be at odds with the behavioral outcomes they produce. Through “institutional inversion,” institutions may facilitate rather than inhibit stigmatized behavior. Here we examine attitudes and behavior related to debt, contrast historically Protestant versus Catholic places, and show how cultural attitudes against debt may lead to the creation of institutions that increase—rather than decrease—borrowing. Historical antidebt attitudes in Protestant places have led to contemporary households in Protestant cultures now carrying the highest debt loads. We discuss the importance of supply side factors, attitude → institutions → behavior causal chains, and some blind spots that lead to unintended consequences.
... In a perfect world, such bans can force employers to stop using child labor. But in reality, they simply lower the wages children are paid, and consequently, compel poorer families to supply more child labor at the cost of the child's education (Bharadwaj et al. 2013;Edmonds & Shrestha 2012). Similarly, policies that prohibit employers from asking about job applicants' criminal histories as a way of reducing racial disparities in employment are found to be counterproductive. ...
... Relating this to the study, while in host countries, deportees' microsystem could include places of work, social networks and diplomatic missions abroad. For instance, social networks increase the likelihood of migration as they could lessen migrants' risks and enhance their stay in host countries (Bermudez et al. 2018;Dako-Gyeke 2016;Edmonds and Shrestha 2012), which may reduce their chances of being deported. The mesosystem refers to the linkages and processes that take place between two or more settings, like the school and work, which contain the developing person (Bronfenbrenner 1979). ...
Generally, the rise in deportation has implications for the resettlement of migrants in their countries of origin. In view of the increasing number of deportees in many developing countries, such as Ghana, this study sought to identify the reasons for deportation, and coping strategies adopted by deportees in the Nkoranza Municipality of Ghana. The study utilized a qualitative research approach and twenty participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Data were collected through individual in-depth interviews and analyzed thematically. The findings indicated that participants returned involuntary due to varied reasons (political instability; illegal entry and stay; and illegal border crossing). Furthermore, it was found that deportees included in this study adopted both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. Evidence showed that the problem-focused strategies involved resettlement grants, as well as moral and financial support from friends and relatives. Besides, positive attitude towards the future and spirituality, were the emotion-focused strategies employed by deportees. Based on the findings of the study, implications are discussed.
... Indeed, today unemployed or under- employed youth are often children working at night. The link between child labor and the results of the labor market may also work in the other direction: a decline in the future labor market may reduce household involvement in human capital investments (Edmonds & Shrestha, 2012). Children employment, that is an individual with age under 18 years, is controlled and managed by various laws developed at country, federal or territory level. ...
... The model in this study is based on researches of Wu [32], Webbink et al. [30,31], Syahruddin [33], Rosati et al. [28], Beegle et al. [26], Cockburn [27], Usman [20], Manurung [23], Asra [9], Edmonds et al. [34,35], Edmonds [36], ILO [3,37]. Not all variables in the studies model used in this framework. ...
How do the (father?s education, mother?s education, children?s education, father?s income, mother?s income, father?s main employment status, mother?s main employment status) on the probability of child labor in Palembang City Indonesia. Scope of this research is to analyze or discuss working children 7-15 years old who are working or not working. Primary data was collected through survey technique from 720 samples, a respondent taken by proportionate stratified random sampling and was analyzed by logistic regression model. Factors that significantly affect child labor include: factors children?s education, father?s main employment status, mother?s main employment status. Factors that influence is not significant to child labor include: the father?s education, mother?s education, father?s income, mother?s income.
This paper proposes new estimates of child labor use in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa farms that are certified free of child labor. The study relies on list experiments (LE) to overcome social desirability bias associated with measuring sensitive issues, implemented on a sample of 4,458 Ivorian cocoa farmers. Findings show that 24 percent of them were helped by at least one child under 16 for harvesting and breaking the cocoa pods during the past 12 months, 21 percent for preparing their farm, and 25 percent employed and paid at least one child to perform any task on their cocoa farm. These results are twice as high as those declared by farmers when directly questioning them about their child labor use. This study provides evidence that the LE method, while more cognitively demanding than the direct questioning method, can be successfully understood by populations with low levels of education. Findings further show that, in this setting, the LE estimates are robust to specific LE design changes.
This paper investigates whether the 1998 Brazilian law that increased the minimum employment age from 14 to 16 lowered child labor and increased school attendance and whether those effects persisted beyond age 16. Using a regression discontinuity design, the results indicate that the ban had a significant impact on urban boys, a cohort that represents half of all paid child labor in Brazil. This cohort had a 35 percent decrease in paid labor, driven mainly by a decrease in informal work, and an 11 percent increase in the share of those only attending school. In addition, there is evidence that these effects persist past the age of enforcement where the affected cohort was less likely to work and more likely to be only attending school beyond age 16. Overall, the results suggest that enforced bans on child labor can have significant immediate and persistent impacts on affected populations.
Sooner or later, all young people have to go through a phase of transition from the educational system to paid work. However, the ease and speed of making a successful transition to a decent job depend crucially on the institutional setting in the respective country or region on the one hand and on the economic circumstances on the other hand. Under adverse institutional and economic conditions phases of transitions can last long and imply persistent scars on later employment experiences, and in fact, problematic institutions can aggravate the negative impact of recessions. Our contribution discusses the role of crisis periods as well as policy measures that influence youth labor markets both in European and developing countries. We highlight the role of labor market institutions in general, including vocational training systems, and the specific role crisis response measures can play in mitigating crisis effects that affect young people more than prime-aged workers due to their more vulnerable situation.
Child marriage is associated with negative outcomes for women and girls. Many countries have raised the legal age of marriage, but the incidence of early marriage remains high. We propose a simple test for whether laws are effective in deterring early marriage and apply it to data from both the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) covering over 100 countries using statistical tests derived from the regression discontinuity literature. By this measure, many countries are not enforcing the laws on their books, and enforcement may be not be improving over time. We argue that survey data provides a simple way to test if laws are being enforced and are binding, and interpret our results to show that legal change needs to be accompanied by better enforcement and greater monitoring to be effective.
The chapter considers why working children are often damaged by policies and programs intended to protect them, pursued in defiance of research that has shown such policies and programs frequently to be harmful to children. It offers an explanation in terms of five widespread illusions: about the universality of childhood, about the incompetence of children, about what constitutes protection from harmful work, about what is moral in relation to children’s work, and about the competence of agencies supposedly protecting children. The chapter uses recent behavioural research in cognitive science to explain why people in these agencies persist in their views against much empirical evidence and impose them against the wishes of working children, their supposed beneficiaries.
Child labor indicators have shown a significant decline since registration began. This is an area where policies and programs have been relatively effective, and there are some evidence-based practices. Actions promoted by the International Labor Organization have followed an institutional approach, involving governments, trade unions, business associations and other social actors. The introduction of legal regulations and social dialogue policies have established the framework for changing sociocultural norms on child labor. In this context, the two types of specific interventions that have proved most effective are conditional cash transfers and programs to guarantee compulsory education.
Brazilian law prohibits all forms of work for children under the age of 14 years old. Therefore, work performed by children under 14 years of age is subject to sanctions that do not apply to work performed by those over 14 years of age. We use this quasi-experiment generated by Brazilian law to test the deterrent effects of such sanctions. For this purpose, we use the 2013 Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra por Domicílios (PNAD) data to estimate the local average treatment effects (LATE) using the regression discontinuity approach. The results indicate that on average, this law results in 88% fewer weekly working hours when individuals living in rural and urban areas are considered. The effects in rural areas are thus inconclusive. The paper concludes that the law has a deterrent effect and reduces child labor in Brazil, but the effects are ambiguous in rural areas, where law enforcement is weaker and more children work.
In parts of Asia, the South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, resulting in the excess mortality of girls and skewing child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, an estimated 1.8 million girls go “missing” because of the widespread use of sex selective practices in these regions. The pervasive use of such practices is reflective of the striking inequities girls face immediately, and it also has possible negative implications for efforts to improve women's status in the long term. Recognizing this as a public policy concern, governments have employed direct measures such as banning the use of prenatal sex selection technology, and providing financial incentives to families that have girls. This study reviews cross-country experiences to take stock of the direct interventions used and finds no conclusive evidence that they are effective in reducing the higher mortality risk for girls. In fact, bans on the use of sex selection technology may inadvertently worsen the status of the very individuals they intend to protect, and financial incentives to families with girls offer only short-term benefits at most. Instead, what seems to work are policies that indirectly raise the value of daughters. The study also underscores the paucity of causal studies in this literature.
Sustainable Development Goal target 8.7 aims to eradicate child labour in all its forms by 2025. Ten years before this deadline, the objective is far from being achieved since in 2016, about one-in-ten children (152 million in total) aged 5 to 17 were engaged in child labour worldwide, many of them as unpaid family workers in agriculture. Nearly half of the children in child labour were in hazardous work and exposed to serious health and safety risks. Moreover, about one-third of children in child labour do not attend school at all; the others go to school, but not all the time. Children in child labour are more likely to leave school early, before grade completion, and underperform in school tests.
This paper reviews child labour trends, and the literature on its causes and consequences. It also discusses policies to combat child labour based on the lessons of the available evidence. Countries must combat child labour by addressing it from all its “demand” and “supply” side dimensions: by strengthening social protection to combat extreme poverty, by investing in the education to make it an affordable alternative to child labour, and by encouraging the diffusion of technologies that make it possible to do without child labour. While most countries have adopted laws that prohibit child labour, the paper argues that countries can do more to enforce these laws and regulations, where necessary strengthen labour inspections and monitoring systems, and promote responsible business practices.
Although bans against child labor are a ubiquitous policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence on their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India’s landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined whom the ban applied to, we show that the relative probability of child employment increases and child wages (relative to adult wages) decrease after the ban. Our main specification relies on comparing changes in work probabilities over time for children of the same age but with siblings who are rendered either eligible or ineligible for legal work when the ban is implemented. The increases in the probability of economic activity are largest for children (i) in areas where the industries targeted by the ban play a larger role in local labor markets, (ii) in areas where the probability of employer inspections is higher, and (iii) in families that are poorer. These results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. We also find decreases in child participation in schooling (for younger children only) and no economically meaningful change in household outcomes like assets or calorie intake.
The International Labour Organisation (the ILO) has regulated child labour through the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. Such conventions aim at the reduction and eventual elimination of harmful labour practices. After the ratification of such conventions, many countries have adopted domestic laws prohibiting harmful labour. Despite such regulations, statistics prove that children still participate in harmful work. The main purpose of this article is to assess the ILO child labour conventions critically, so as to provide further understanding of the provisions of the text of such instruments. While the aim of the Minimum Age Convention was the progressive eradication of child labour, the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention recognises the existence of tolerable forms of child labour, and it seeks to eliminate the worst forms of child labour.
This chapter presents a more nuanced approach to children’s work than what appears in the dominant discourse of abolishing “child labor.” In many societies, children’s work is seen as a component of attentive child-rearing, conveying benefits for the children with respect both to their immediate well-being and to their future prospects. Work has immediate economic benefits for children and their families, which are especially important in situations of poverty and which are not always confined to the short term. Work can also confer social, psychological, and cognitive benefits that contribute in the longer term to child development and to incorporation into the child’s community. Moreover, particularly in situations of poverty, schooling frequently fails to overcome disadvantages of background or to guarantee future security for children. For many children, a combination of work and school provides the best chance of development to their fullest potential.
This article argues for holistic consideration of children's work. Dominant discourse on ‘child labour’ attends only to dangers of children's work, leading to policies that damage some children's chances for development. Far from being universally negative in children's lives, appropriate work contributes to their well-being and development, and to transitions to adulthood. Children's work can convey benefits for sustenance and quality of life; provide learning to complement and support school; offer psychosocial benefits, particularly in building self-esteem; and help develop social relations and responsibility. These benefits are especially critical for marginalized children. Common policies of abolishing child labour based on age of employment rather than potential harm deny such benefits to younger children. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
This research explains the effects of gender, parents’ education, parent’s income, the number of siblings, childbirth order, the presence of parents and patriarchal kinship system on the
probability of child labor in Palembang. This study, especially, investigates the probability of children age 7-15 years old to be a worker. It is found that factors that significantly affect child
labor are gender, the number of siblings, childbirth order, the presence of parents and patriarchal system. However, parents’ education and income are found to be insignificant in
affecting the probability of child labor in Palembang.
This paper investigates the labor market effect of international migration on child work in countries of origin. We use an original cross-country survey dataset, which combines information on international migration with detailed individual-level data on child labour at age 5-14 in a wide range of developing countries. By exploiting both within and cross-country variation and controlling for country fixed effects, we find strong and robust evidence on the role of international mobility of workers in reducing child labour in disadvantaged households through changes in the local labour market.
The International Labour Organisation (the ILO) has regulated child labour through the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. Such conventions aim at the reduction and eventual elimination of harmful labour practices. After the ratification of such conventions, many countries have adopted domestic laws prohibiting harmful labour. Despite such regulations, statistics prove that children still participate in harmful work. The main purpose of this article is to assess the ILO child labour conventions critically, so as to provide further understanding of the provisions of the text of such instruments. While the aim of the Minimum Age Convention was the progressive eradication of child labour, the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention recognises the existence of tolerable forms of child labour, and it seeks to eliminate the worst forms of child labour.
In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more stringent and potentially constrained secondary-school aged youths. It might appear from the timing and the specifics of this history that the laws caused the increase in education rates. We evaluate the possibility that state compulsory schooling and child labor laws caused the increase in education rates by using contemporaneous evidence on enrollments. We also use micro-data from the 1960 census to examine the effect of the laws on overall educational attainment. Our estimation approach exploits cross-state differences in the timing of changes in state laws. We find that the expansion of state compulsory schooling and child labor laws from 1910 to 1939 can, at best, account for 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollments and can account for about the same portion of the increase in the eventual educational attainment for the affected cohorts over the period.
The regression discontinuity (RD) design has recently become a standard method for identifying causal effects for policy interventions. We use an unusual "tie breaking" experiment, the Kentucky Working Profiling and Reemployment Services, to investigate the performance of widely used RD estimators. Two features characterize this program. First, the treatment (reemployment services) is assigned as a discontinuous function of a profiling variable (expected benefit receipt duration), which allows the identification of both experimental and non-experimental samples. Second, we deal with a discontinuity frontier rather than a discontinuity point, which allows the identification of local average treatment effects over a wide range of the support of the discontinuous variable. Using a variety of multivariate parametric and nonparametric kernel estimators, we estimate the bias with respect to the benchmark experimental estimates. In general, we find that local linear kernel estimates show the least bias. Parametric RD estimates are sensitive to the specification choice of the outcome equation, the sample used in the estimations, and econometric details. We also examine two alternative discontinuities –time and geography and find they perform as well as the intrinsic discontinuity in scores.
The change to the minimum school-leaving age in the United Kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14-year-olds in the mid-twentieth century to stay in school for one more year. The magnitude of this impact provides a rare opportunity to (a) estimate local average treatment effects (LATE) of high school that come close to population average treatment effects (ATE); and (b) estimate returns to education using a regression discontinuity design instead of previous estimates that rely on difference-in-differences methodology or relatively weak instruments. Comparing LATE estimates for the United States and Canada, where very few students were affected by compulsory school laws, to the United Kingdom estimates provides a test as to whether instrumental variables (IV) returns to schooling often exceed ordinary least squares (OLS) because gains are high only for small and peculiar groups among the more general population. I find, instead, that the benefits from compulsory schooling are very large whether these laws have an impact on a majority or minority of those exposed.
This paper provides an introduction and "user guide" to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a "quasi-experimental" design, and summarizes different ways (with their advantages and disadvantages) of estimating RD designs and the limitations of interpreting these estimates. Concepts are discussed using examples drawn from the growing body of empirical research using RD. ( JEL C21, C31)
Were compulsory attendance and child labor laws responsible for the incredible growth in secondary schooling from 1915 to 1939? Using 1960 census data, I find that legally requiring children to attend school for 1 more year, by increasing the age required for a work permit or lowering the entrance age, increased educational attainment by about 5 percent. The effect was similar for white males and females, but there was no effect for blacks. Continuation school laws that required working children to attend school on a part-time basis were effective for white males only. These laws increased the education only of those in the lower percentiles of the education distribution, thereby decreasing education inequality, perhaps by as much as 15 percent. States with higher levels of wealth, higher percentage of immigrants, or lower percentage of blacks were more likely to pass stringent laws. The results also suggest that these laws were not endogenous. Copyright 2002 by the University of Chicago.
Between 1880 and 1930, the occupation rate of children age 10 to 15 fell by over 75%. This paper examines whether state laws restricting the employment of child labor contributed to this decline. Using data from the 1880, 1900, and 1910 federal censuses, I test whether minimum age limits for manufacturing employment enacted during this period constrained the occupational choices of children. I use a “difference-in-differences-in-differences” procedure to isolate the effects of the laws from the effects of other forces influencing the demand and supply of child labor. I find that minimum age limits had relatively little effect on the occupation choices of children at the turn of the century and conclude that these restrictions contributed little to the long run decline in child labor.
We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences, and multiple steady states can arise. The introduction of child labor laws can be triggered by skill-biased technological change, which induces parents to choose smaller families. The theory can account for the observation that, in Britain, regulations were first introduced after a period of rising wage inequality, and coincided with rapid fertility decline.
The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the “extremely poor” people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. A number of recent data sets and a body of new research allow us to start building an image of the way the extremely poor live their lives. Our discussion builds on household surveys conducted in 13 countries: Cote d'Ivoire, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and Timor Leste (East Timor). These surveys provide detailed information on extremely poor households around the world, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, including information on what they consume, where they work, and how they save and borrow. We consider the extremely poor—those living in households where the consumption per capita is less than 2.16 a day—using 1993 purchasing power parity as benchmark. In keeping with convention, we call these the 2 dollar poverty lines, respectively.
If child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents' concern for the household's survival, the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force. However, this assumption about parental decision making, coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor, could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market, with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work. The paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.
Edited by: Shultz TP
- E Edmonds
- Child
- Labor
The Impact of Minimum Age of Employment Regulation on Child Labor and Schooling: Evidence from UNICEF MICS Countries Working Paper # 18623
- E Edmonds
- Shrestha
Cite this article as: Edmonds and Shrestha: The impact of minimum age of employment regulation on child labor and schooling *
Cite this article as: Edmonds and Shrestha: The impact of minimum age of employment regulation on child labor
and schooling *. IZA Journal of Labor Policy 2012 1:14.
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