Child Farm Labor : The Wealth Paradox

Bhalotra, Sonia ; Heady, Christopher

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: AGE GROUP;    AIDS ORPHANS;    BARGAINING;    BARGAINING POWER;    CAPITAL MARKETS;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wber/lhg017
RP-ID  :  77404

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This article is motivated by theremarkable observation that children of land-rich householdsare often more likely to be in work than the children ofland-poor households. The vast majority of working childrenin developing economies are in agricultural work,predominantly on farms operated by their families. Land isthe most important store of wealth in agrarian societies,and it is typically distributed very unequally. These factschallenge the common presumption that child labor emergesfrom the poorest households. This article suggests that thisapparent paradox can be explained by failures of the marketsfor labor and land. Credit market failure will tend toweaken the force of this paradox. These effects are modeledand estimates obtained using survey data from rural Pakistanand Ghana. The main result is that the wealth paradoxpersists for girls in both countries, whereas for boys itdisappears after conditioning on other covariates.