Public Health in the Economics of Child Labor

Most of the world’s economically active children work by their parents’ side, often in a family farm or business. A 2000 UNICEF project surveyed working children in 36 developing countries [1]. The data represent more than 120 million children ages 5 to 14. Although nearly 70 percent of children in these countries spend time in some form of economic activity or domestic chores, less than 3 percent work in the formal wage labor market [2]. Most of this wage employment, like most employment overall in the world’s poorest economies, is in agriculture.