CHILD LABOR: Cause, Consequence and Cure, with Remarks on International Labor Standards

A TO THE Bureau of Statistics of the International Labor Organization, in 1995 at least 120 million of the world’s children between the ages of five and fourteen years did full-time, paid work (ILO 1996; Kebebew Ashagrie 1998). Many of them worked under hazardous and unhygienic conditions and for more than ten hours a day. This is not a new problem. In different parts of the world, at different stages of history, the laboring child has been a part of economic life. In particular, children have worked in large numbers in factories from the time of the industrial revolution in Europe and from the mid-nineteenth century in America. In contemporary times, the incidence of child labor is very high in Third World countries, and it has been that way for several decades now. What has increased is the awareness of and concern for children who work as laborers. This is caused, in part, by the increasing globalization of the world, which has brought not only more information about the condition of labor in different nations to academics and activists the world over, but also goods produced by children in faraway lands into the hands of consumers in high-income countries. This has, in turn, brought two very different kinds of people onto the same platform—individuals who are genuinely concerned about the plight of children in poor countries, and those who comprise the forces of protectionism in developed countries. The two have rallied together to support a variety of interventions in Third World labor markets, ranging from banning imports into industrialized nations of products “tainted” by child labor inputs, through setting international labor standards to be monitored by international organizations such as the WTO or ILO, to labeling products that involved child labor so as to give the consumer the option to boycott them. 1 Cornell University. For useful comments and suggestions I am grateful to Jens Andvig, Kebebew Ashagrie, Alaka Basu, Clive Bell, Francois Bourguignon, George Boyer, Dan Bromley, Jean Dreze, Patrick Emerson, Gary Fields, Garance Genicot, Noemi Giszpenc, Subbiah Kannapan, Ayal Kimhi, Elizabeth King, Luis-Felipe LopezCalva, Dani Rodrik, Pham Hoang Van, Henry Wan, and three anonymous referees of the Journal. I have also benefited from seminar presentations at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, the University of Wisconsin, Notre Dame University, the World Bank, and the NEUDC Conference at Yale University.