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Persistent Agricultural Shocks and Child Poverty
The Journal of Development Studies
Children in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks and adversities and child labor is often seen as a direct consequence of poverty and economic downturns. While such univocal causality may appear obvious, its empirical basis has not been systematically evaluated. To understand the linkages between shocks, changes in the economic situation of families and child labor, we therefore conduct a systematic literature review on the impact of income-related shocks on child labor. We evaluate empirical studies of weather events and natural disasters, agricultural shocks such as crop failures, family shocks like parental illness, price shocks and transnational shocks through trade, migration, and remittances. Focusing on the literature that identifies causal effects, we find that the relationship between shocks and child labor is far from univocal. While in most cases adverse shocks increase child labor, we find that favorable shocks that improve earning opportunities may also cause more child labor. Policies to tackle child labor should therefore develop safety nets that minimize the probability of children being used as buffers in adverse economic downturns, but also consider the risk that positive economic shocks may attract children into labor due to changes to the value of children's time spent working.
Objective
To investigate the relation of child dietary diversity and household food insecurity along with other socio-demographic with child anthropometric indices in north-central Ethiopia, an area with a high level of food insecurity and inadequate diet quality.
Design
A community-based cross-sectional study was used.
Settings
The study was conducted in Dessie and Combolcha towns of north-central Ethiopia from April to May 2018.
Participants
Randomly selected 512 mother-child pairs with child’s age range of 6–59 months.
Results
The mean (± SD) scores of weight-for-height/length, height/length-for-age, weight-for-age, and BMI-for-age Z-scores were 1.35 (± 2.03), − 1.89 (± 1.79), 0.05 (± 1.54), and 1.39 (± 2.06), respectively. From all anthropometric indicators, stunting and overweight/obesity remained the severe public issues hitting 43% and 42% of the children, respectively. In the model, mothers’ age and education and child’s age, sex, and dietary diversity were significantly related with child height-for-age Z-score while place of residence, sex of household head, child’s age, and dietary diversity score were the predictors of child BMI-for-age Z-score in the urban contexts of the study area. Nevertheless, food insecurity was not related to any of the child anthropometric indices.
Conclusion
The double burden of malnutrition epidemics (stunting and obesity) coexisted as severe public health concerns in urban settings. Anthropometric statuses of children were affected by multidimensional factors and seek strong integration and immediate intervention of multiple sectors.
Background: Ethiopia is one of the developing countries where child under-nutrition is prevalent. Prior studies
employed three anthropometric indicators for identifying factors of children’s under-nutrition. This study aimed at
identifying the factors of child under-nutrition using a single composite index of anthropometric indicators.
Methods: Data from Ethiopia’s Demographic and Health Survey 2016 was the base for studying under-nutrition in
a sample of 9494 children below 59 months. A single composite index of under-nutrition was created from three
anthropometric indices through principal component analysis recoded into an ordinal outcome. In line with World
Health Organization 2006 Child Growth Standards, the three anthropometric indices involve z-score of height-forage
(stunting), weight-for-height (wasting) and weight-for-age (underweight). Partial proportional odds model was
fitted and its relative performance compared with some other ordinal regression models to identify significant
determinants of under-nutrition.
Results: The single composite index of anthropometric indicators showed that 49.0% (19.8% moderately and 29.2%
severely) of sampled children were undernourished. In the Brant-test of proportional odds model, the null
hypothesis that the model parameters equal across categories was rejected. Compared to ordinal regression
models, partial proportional odds model showed an improved fit. A child with mother’s body mass index less than
18.5 kg, from poorest family and a husband without education, and male to be in a severe under-nutrition status
was 1.4, 1.8 1.2 and 1.2 times more likely to be in worse under-nutrition status compared to its reference group
respectively.
Conclusion: Authors conclude that the fitted partial proportional odds model indicated that age and sex of the
child, maternal education, region, source of drinking water, number of under five children, mother’s body mass
index and wealth index, anemic status of child, multiple births, fever of child before 2 months of the survey,
mother’s age at first birth, and husband’s education were significantly associated with child under-nutrition. Thus, it
is argued that interventions focus on improving household wealth index, food security, educating mothers and
their spouses, improving maternal nutritional status, and increasing mothers’ health care access.
The paper investigates the impact of rainfall shocks on agricultural productivity and crop-specific agricultural
land productivity. The paper also examines the impact of negative rainfall shocks on household consumption as
well as its distributional impact by initial wealth and geographical zones. We use nationally representative panel
datasets from Nigeria merged with georeferenced rainfall information. Negative rainfall shocks have heterogeneous
effects on crop-specific agricultural productivity and based on geographical zones. We use an instrumental
variables regression approach, where agricultural land productivity is instrumented with negative
rainfall shocks. A negative rainfall shock decreases agricultural productivity and hence decreases household
consumption by 37%. We also show considerable differential impacts of rainfall shocks on household consumption
by initial values of wealth and geographical zones. Rainfall shocks have a negative, significant impact
for asset-poor and nonpoor households, but has a higher impact on household consumption for asset-poor
households. Similarly, it has higher impact for land-poor households and households in northern Nigeria.
This study examines current land access and livelihood choices of rural youth in Southern Ethiopia. We found that youth in rural south have limited access to agricultural land because of land scarcity and land market restrictions. We hypothesize that this forces the youth to abandon agriculture in search of other livelihoods. Our study shows that only 9% of the rural youth plan to pursue agriculture as their livelihood. We also found a sharp increase in youth outmigration in the past six years. Our econometric analyses confirm that lack of land access is forcing the youth away from an agricultural livelihood.
We present new evidence that households are unable to protect themselves from rainfall failure that occurs on average every five years in rural Ethiopia. However, other less extreme rainfall variation and idiosyncratic shocks such as illness and crop pests do not impact significantly on consumption. Agricultural shocks impact negatively on farm income as expected, however they also stimulate non-agricultural earnings by an equivalent amount. In the case of a covariate shock such as severe rainfall failure, this smoothing mechanism may be ineffective and rainfall insurance or drought-triggered safety nets could provide further protection.
During the global food crisis, Ethiopia experienced an unprecedented increase in inflation, among the highest in Africa. Using monthly data over the past decade, we estimate models of inflation to identify the importance of the factors contributing to CPI inflation and three of its major components: cereal prices, food prices, and non-food prices. Our main finding is that movements in international food and goods prices, measured in domestic currency, determined the long-run evolution of domestic prices. In the short run, agricultural supply shocks affected food inflation, causing large deviations from long-run price trends. Monetary policy seems to have accommodated price shocks, but money supply growth affected short-run non-food price inflation. Our results suggest that when analyzing inflation in developing economies with a large food share in consumer prices, world food prices and domestic agricultural production should be considered. Omitting these factors can lead to biased results and misguided policy decisions.
Summary Young Lives is an international longitudinal study investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four low-income countries [Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam] over a 15-year period. In each country, the cohort is comprised of ∼2000 children aged between 6 and 18 months and up to 1000 children aged between 7 and 8 years, recruited in 2002 and sampled from 20 sentinel sites. The first survey data collection from primary caregivers and older children took place in 2002, the second in 2006-07 and the third in 2009-10. Data on the community contexts were collected to complement the household surveys. To elaborate and extend the quantitative data, longitudinal qualitative research with a subgroup of the children was carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2010-11. Topic areas covered included nutrition, health and well-being, cognitive and physical development, health behaviours and education, as well as the social, demographic and economic status of the household. Survey data from the study are archived in the International Section of the UK Public Data Archive.
The author studies the effect of an agricultural shock and a labor sharing arrangement (informal social network) on child labor. Albeit bad parental preference to child labor (as the strand of literature claims), poor households face compelling situations to send their child to work. This is, especially, true when they are hit by an income shock and face a binding adult labor constraint. The author used panel data from the ERHS and employed a fixed effects model to pin down causal relation between shocks, membership in a labor sharing arrangement and child labor. It was found that child labor is, indeed, a buffer stock. Though a labor sharing arrangement doesn’t affect child labor at normal times, it helps households to lessen the pressure to rely on it when hit by idiosyncratic shocks. While almost the whole effect of these shocks is offset by participation in a labor sharing arrangement, the covariate shock is not. Even if this may well affect a child’s academic performance, school attendance doesn’t decrease. This differential effect of shocks on child labor in participant households might be because of the extra adult labor made available or due to mutual support that comes with these social networks. This paper is indicative of the importance of considering social networks in smoothing out consumption. Further, it highlights the difficulty to cope up with covariate shocks and hence, calls for development interventions that are particularly meant to address their impact.
It is often argued that child labour is caused by poverty. However, much child labour takes place in rural areas characterized
by substantial labour market imperfections. A model of rural household labour supply is developed that provides testable implications
for two versions of the poverty hypothesis: that child labour is due to a binding subsistence constraint and that child leisure
is a luxury good. We find that in rural Burkina Faso children do not provide labour to meet households' subsistence needs
and that child leisure is a normal good. The evidence suggests that labour market imperfections are a main reason for using
child labour.
The association between test scores in primary school and college attendance, and how this association differs by socioeconomic status (SES), remains an open question in low- and middle-income countries. Using data from long-running panel studies in Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Peru and Vietnam, we show that children with higher test scores at age 12 report more years of schooling and higher college attendance by ∼age 22 in every country. However, variation in test scores explain only ∼15–55% of the SES gap in years of completed schooling at age 22. A striking implication is that in every country, children from low SES backgrounds who are in the 80th percentile of test scores at age 12 have similar years of completed schooling at age 22 as children from high SES backgrounds who were at the 20th percentile of test scores.
The increasing frequency of negative rainfall shocks presents households with the challenging choice of whether to send their children to school or to withdraw them in order for them to provide support in the household. We use high-resolution spatial rainfall data matched with the georeferenced Uganda National Panel Survey data to estimate the effect of negative rainfall shocks on children’s school attendance. We find that exposure to negative rainfall shocks significantly reduces children’s school attendance by almost 10%. These results have important policy implications for improving children’s schooling, particularly in geographical areas that receive particularly erratic rainfalls, in Uganda.
Despite the achievement of gender equity in education in many developing countries, a gender gap still exists with respect to formal employment. Through inhibiting women's empowerment and reducing the supply and productivity of labour, this gap results in poorer development outcomes. This paper examines whether exogenous rainfall shocks experienced in early life explain variations in future formal sector employment outcomes. It does so for Vietnam, a country that is highly vulnerable to rainfall shocks. The paper employs data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey and rainfall data from the Gridded Monthly Time Series Dataset. Findings suggest that rainfall shocks experienced early in life have a long temporal reach by reducing the probability of formal sector employment for women but not for men. Other findings indicate that the gendered impact of rainfall shocks operates through differential effects on educational attainment and that shocks occurring in the first and second year of life are most important.
In this article, we consider identification, estimation, and inference procedures for treatment effect parameters using Difference-in-Differences (DiD) with (i) multiple time periods, (ii) variation in treatment timing, and (iii) when the “parallel trends assumption” holds potentially only after conditioning on observed covariates. We show that a family of causal effect parameters are identified in staggered DiD setups, even if differences in observed characteristics create non-parallel outcome dynamics between groups. Our identification results allow one to use outcome regression, inverse probability weighting, or doubly-robust estimands. We also propose different aggregation schemes that can be used to highlight treatment effect heterogeneity across different dimensions as well as to summarize the overall effect of participating in the treatment. We establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and prove the validity of a computationally convenient bootstrap procedure to conduct asymptotically valid simultaneous (instead of pointwise) inference. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of our proposed tools by analyzing the effect of the minimum wage on teen employment from 2001–2007. Open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methods.
The two-way linear fixed effects regression ( 2FE ) has become a default method for estimating causal effects from panel data. Many applied researchers use the 2FE estimator to adjust for unobserved unit-specific and time-specific confounders at the same time. Unfortunately, we demonstrate that the ability of the 2FE model to simultaneously adjust for these two types of unobserved confounders critically relies upon the assumption of linear additive effects. Another common justification for the use of the 2FE estimator is based on its equivalence to the difference-in-differences estimator under the simplest setting with two groups and two time periods. We show that this equivalence does not hold under more general settings commonly encountered in applied research. Instead, we prove that the multi-period difference-in-differences estimator is equivalent to the weighted 2FE estimator with some observations having negative weights. These analytical results imply that in contrast to the popular belief, the 2FE estimator does not represent a design-based, nonparametric estimation strategy for causal inference. Instead, its validity fundamentally rests on the modeling assumptions.
Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate treatment effects. We show that they estimate weighted sums of the average treatment effects (ATE ) in each group and period, with weights that may be negative. Due to the negative weights, the linear regression coefficient may for instance be negative while all the ATEs are positive. We propose another estimator that solves this issue. In the two applications we revisit, it is significantly different from the linear regression estimator. (JEL C21, C23, D72, J31, J51, L82)
Theoretically, the relationship between shocks and agricultural innovation adoption could be ambiguous. While shocks could lower the competence and capacity of households to adopt new agricultural innovations, households can also take-up agricultural innovations as a coping mechanism against the different shocks they face. Using a nationally representative household data from Ethiopia provided through the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) of the World Bank, this paper analyzes the effect of idiosyncratic and covariate shocks on adoption of different agricultural innovations, assuming interdependence among the innovations. We find shocks to have heterogeneous effects on the adoption of agricultural innovations. Specifically, production and health shocks have negative effects on the adoption of high-cost innovations such as improved seeds, chemical fertilizer, and irrigation. However, production shocks are positively associated with low-cost innovations such as organic fertilizer. To enhance farmers’ adoption of agricultural innovations, especially high-cost innovations, there is a greater need towards the design of policies and interventions that would reduce households' exposure to production and health shocks.
There is growing empirical support that poor maternal nutrition during pregnancy can lead to permanent fetal adaptations that affect health throughout a child’s life. Most of the evidence stems from evaluating the impact of extreme prenatal deprivations due to atypical events such as droughts or floods. However, less is known about the magnitude of effects due to more normal variations in food availability. This study estimates the impact of prenatal exposure to seasonal food scarcity on the evolution of childhood health for a cohort of Ethiopian children born in 2001–02. A novel measure of seasonal exposure was constructed based on reported months of relative food scarcity in the local community collected shortly after birth. While exposure was found to have little effect on child height at age one, a larger and statistically significant negative impact emerges by age eight and strengthens by age twelve. Effects in early childhood also appear to be latent from the view of parents with little evidence of remedial investments in exposed children after birth. We conclude that mild prenatal nutritional deprivations could have significant impacts on long-term health and well-being even if effects are small or unobserved in early childhood. This implies caution against the common use of birth and early-life outcomes as the sole evaluation tools for mild prenatal insults or interventions. Overall, results highlight that in addition to the effects of severe famine conditions identified in many studies, more typical variation in prenatal food availability can have lasting impacts on health in the developing world.
Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production, particularly in the developing world. We introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age. Using data on test scores and schooling from rural India, we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life (in utero to age 2) but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16. Children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher. The opportunity cost of schooling, even for fairly young children, is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment.
This article investigates the links between early-life rainfall and long-term child health in Indonesia. The model specification pays close attention to the timing of rainfall before and after birth, and to the mechanisms by which rainfall might affect health. The model separates out effects of the amount of rainfall from variability in rainfall, and the direction of variability. Results provide evidence of early life rainfall having both nutrition and disease effects on child height-for-age, especially for urban children.
Poor health at birth has negative long-run effects on individual well-being and is also detrimental for intergenerational mobility. This paper examines whether health outcomes at birth are affected by in utero increased exposure to rainfall and temperature shocks in Colombia, one of the countries in the world with the highest incidence of extreme weather events per year. The paper uses a fixed effects design to gauge the causal effect using variation in fetal exposure to these shocks by municipality and date of birth. The analysis finds negative effects of temperature shocks on birth health outcomes and no effect of rainfall shocks. The results indicate that heat waves lead to a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the probability of being born at full term and a decline of 0.4 percentage point in the probability of newborns classified as healthy. The timing of exposure to the shock matters and it matters differently for different outcomes. These findings are critical to prioritize responses to counteract the negative effects of weather, particularly hot shocks, which are projected to become more frequent and intense with changing climate.
Do parents invest more in higher quality children, or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments? We answer this question in the context of a large-scale iodine supplementation program in Tanzania. We find that children with higher program exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer. Siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunized. Fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Household-level impacts of environmental shocks are often negative, but may vary considerably due to heterogeneous vulnerability. This paper considers how differential vulnerability among households affects inequality within rural communities in Ethiopia. This study makes novel use of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and a NASA agro-climatology dataset. Results show that rainfall deficits have an equalizing effect on within-community livestock inequality in parts of Ethiopia, but regional differences are observed. A non-significant effect is observed with respect to asset inequality. As an initial study on this topic, this paper outlines an agenda for future data collection and analysis efforts.
This paper assesses the impact of risk and shocks on non-farm enterprise development in rural Ethiopia using a matched household–enterprise–community dataset augmented with precipitation based measures of risk. The likelihood of running a non-farm firm and the returns to running such firms co-vary with agricultural productivity shocks. Diversification into non-farm activities thus provides limited protection against fluctuations in agricultural performance. This may explain why ex-ante risk has no impact on the likelihood of running a non-farm firm. It nonetheless hampers non-farm enterprise development by repressing investment and inducing sorting into less capital-intensive activities.
Season of birth is associated with later outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. We consider a new explanation: variation in maternal characteristics. We document large changes in maternal characteristics for births throughout the year; winter births are disproportionally realized by teenagers and the unmarried. Family background controls explain nearly half of season-of-birth's relation to adult outcomes. Seasonality in maternal characteristics is driven by women trying to conceive; we find no seasonality among unwanted births. Prior seasonality-in-fertility research focuses on conditions at conception; here expected conditions at birth drive variation in maternal characteristics while conditions at conception are unimportant.
Indian girls have significantly lower school enrollment rates than boys. Anecdotal evidence suggests that gender-differential treatment is the main explanation, but empirical support is often weak. I analyze school enrollment using rainfall shocks, a plausibly exogenous source of income variation. Rainfall shocks matter most for young children and monotonically decline with age. Girls' school enrollment is more vulnerable to rainfall shocks than that of boys for 6-10 year olds, but there are no gender differences for older children. I argue that these results need to be interpreted carefully since they are a combination of two underlying effects, but propose that one explanation are age-specific forms of gender discrimination.
Neoclassical growth models and endogenous growth theories show the positive contribution of human capital to growth. Using household panel data (1994–2000) on individuals who reported their wages in urban Ethiopia, we estimated a relationship between health measures (i.e. proxied by height and BMI) and wages (which proxies productivity/growth). Our findings from the IV quantile regression estimates indicate that productivity is positively and significantly affected by education, height and BMI. The return to BMI is important both at the lower and upper end of the wage distribution. The return to height is significant only at the end of the wage distribution. The substantive content of the results (i.e. the high-nutrition and high-productivity equilibrium story) does not change even if we did not control for endogeneity of schooling. Non-parametric evidence also supports the strong and positive relationship between productivity and our indicators of human capital.
Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted-U relationship between land holdings and child labor. Using a unique data set that has child labor hours it is found that, controlling for child, household and village characteristics, the turning point beyond which more land leads to a decline in child labor occurs around 4 ac of land per household.
Estimation of the dynamic error components model is considered using two alternative linear estimators that are designed to improve the properties of the standard first-differenced GMM estimator. Both estimators require restrictions on the initial conditions process. Asymptotic efficiency comparisons and Monte Carlo simulations for the simple AR(1) model demonstrate the dramatic improvement in performance of the proposed estimators compared to the usual first-differenced GMM estimator, and compared to non-linear GMM. The importance of these results is illustrated in an application to the estimation of a labour demand model using company panel data.
This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks. Using data from a household panel survey in Tanzania, we find that both relationships are significant. We investigate mechanisms that could account for these results, including buffer stocks and borrowing. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
We test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. The risk insurance models are estimated by Generalized Method of Moments treating income and household size as endogenous. Partial insurance is indicated for all wealth groups, although the hypothesis of perfect insurance is universally rejected. The rejection of full insurance is strongest for the poorest wealth decile, with 40% of an income shock being passed onto current consumption. By contrast, consumption by the richest third of households is protected from almost 90% of an income shock. The extent of insurance in a given wealth stratum varies little between poor and non-poor areas.
This paper develops a model of the transmission of earnings, assets, and consumption from parents to descendants. The model assumes utility-maximizing parents who are concerned about the welfare of their children. The degree of intergenerational mobility is determined by the interaction of this utility-maximizing behavior with investment and consumption opportunities in different gene rations and with different kinds of luck. The authors examine a number of empirical studies for different countries. Regression to the mean in earnings in rich countries appears to be rapid. Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations. Copyright 1986 by University of Chicago Press.
This paper examines the similarity in wealth between parents and their children, and explores alternative explanations for this relationship. We find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37, before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and ownership of particular assets, both of which exhibit strong intergeneration similarity, jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future bequests account for little of the remaining elasticity. Using new experimental evidence, we assess the importance of risk tolerance. The risk tolerance measures vary as theory would predict with the ownership of risky assets, and are highly correlated between parents and children. However, they explain little of the intergenerational correlation in the propensity to own different assets, suggesting that children's savings propensities are determined by mimicking their parents' behavior, or the inheritance of preferences not related to risk tolerance. Additionally, these risk tolerance measures explain only a small part of the remaining intergenerational wealth elasticity.
The permanent income hypothesis implies that people save because they rationally expect their permanent income to decline; they save "for a rainy day." It follows that saving should be at l east as good a predictor of declines in labor income as any other for ecast that can be constructed from publicly available information. Th e paper tests this hitherto ignored implication of the permanent inco me hypothesis, using quarterly aggregate data for the period 1953-84 in the United States. By contrast with much of the recent literature, the results here are valid when income is stationary in first differ ences rather than levels. Copyright 1987 by The Econometric Society.
This paper develops consistent model and moment selection criteria for GMM estimation. The criteria select the correct model specification and all correct moment conditions asymptotically. The selection criteria resemble the widely used likelihood-based selection criteria BIC, HQIC, and AIC. (The latter is not consistent.) The GMM selection criteria are based on the J statistic for testing over-identifying restrictions. Bonus terms reward the use of fewer parameters for a given number of moment conditions and the use of more moment conditions for a given number of parameters. The paper also considers a consistent downward testing procedure. The paper applies the model and moment selection criteria to dynamic panel data models with unobserved individual effects. The paper shows how to apply the selection criteria to select the lag length for lagged dependent variables, to detect the number and locations of structural breaks, to determine the exogeneity of regressors, and/or to determine the existence of correlation between some regressors and the individual effect. To illustrate the finite sample performance of the selection criteria and the testing procedures and their impact on parameter estimation, the paper reports the results of a Monte Carlo experiment on a dynamic panel data model.
This paper examines the long-term effects of low birthweight (LBW) on educational attainments, labor market outcomes, and health status using data from the National Child Development Study. The study has followed the cohort of children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 through age 33. We pay particular attentionto possible interactions between LBS and socio-economic status (SES), asking to what extent the deleterious effects of LBW are mitigated by higher SES. We find that LBW has significant long-term effects on self-reported health status, educational attainments, and labor market outcomes. However, there is little evidence of variation in the effects of LBW by SES. An important exception is that high SES women of LBW are less likely to report that they are in poor or fair health than other LBW women.
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.
A guide to young lives rounds 1 to 5 constructed files
- K Briones
- Briones K.
Factors shaping trajectories to child and early marriage: Evidence from young lives in India
- R Singh
- U Vennam
Building resilience to climate shocks in Ethiopia
- J Koo
- J Thurlow
- H Eldidi
- C Ringler
- A De Pinto
- Koo J.
Young lives survey design and sampling (round 5)
- Lives Young
- Young Lives
Life satisfaction and schooling
- E S Huebner
- K L J Hills
- J S Dall
- R Gilman
- Huebner E. S.
Economic development
- M P Todaro
- S C Smith
- Todaro M. P.