International Labor Standards and the Political Economy of Child Labor Regulation Child labor is a persistent phenomenon in many developing countries. In recent years, support has been growing among rich-country governments and consumer groups for the use of trade policies, such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards, to reduce child labor in poor countries. In ...

This paper examines the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, there has been little work done to assess its importance empirically. We measure child labor as a country aggregate, and credit constraints are proxied by the level of financial development. These two variables display a strong neg...

Background For decades, child labor has been an important global issue associated with inadequate educational opportunities, poverty and gender inequality. In order to make effective policies to reduce child labor it is important to understand the specific factors that ...

Vietnam experienced a dramatic decline in child labor during the 1990s. The aim of this study is to explore in detail this decline and to document the heterogeneity across households in both levels of child labor and in the incidence of this decline in child labor. We find a strong correlation between living standards improvements and child labor so that much of the variation in declines in chi...

Using empirical methods, this paper examines household schooling and child labor decisions in rural Bangladesh. The results suggest the following: poverty and low parental education are associated with lower schooling and greater child labor; asset-owning households are more likely to have children combine child labor with schooling; households choose the same activity for all children within t...

This paper analyzes the impacts of child labor on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children in the spirit of Becker and Lewis (1973). It shows that without child labor, the quantity of children can be a normal good so that it increases with parental income under some fairly standard formulations. However, the correlation between fertility and parental income becomes negative ...

Despite recent multilateral efforts to single out child labor in debt bondage as one of the worst forms of child labor, several important questions have yet to be addressed: Howpervasive is the phenomenon?Are there systematic correlations between the incidence of children in debt bondage and the economic, legislative, and financial development indicators of the economy? How does an understandin...

This paper uses micro data from the Brazilian PNAD between 1981 and 2002 to ascertain the role of local labor demand play in shaping work and schooling decisions of children aged 10-15. Using male adult employment by state and year as a proxy for labor demand, we find evidence that contrary to the widespread view that child labor is procyclical among young children (ages 1012) employment (schoo...

It is often forgotten that child labor is part of a multi-generational problem due in part to the failure to educate girls. Although the literacy rate for women has improved over the last two decades, in many countries it is less than half that of their male counterparts. This in turn leads to nutritional deficiencies, poverty, and poor health. While many researchers address the immediate healt...

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard dynastic social welfare function, which is commonly applied to intergenerational models, child labor is...