DEVELOPMENT

PROJECT

CHILD LABOUR

- Medha Roopam
- Sharlin Sebastian
 CONTENTS

1. Contents
2. Acknowledgement
3. Introduction
4. Causes of Child Labour
a) The family context
b) The role of poverty
c) Additional household factors
d) Economic Shocks
e) More about parents
f) Demand side factors
5. Study, Model and Discussion on scenario in rural India
a) Introduction
b) Parental decisions and child labour
c) Discussion and Model
6. Bibliography
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We are highly grateful to our teacher [Link] Singh

for all the guidance and the assistance delivered to us in this
academic year without whom this project would have been
incomplete and unclear to us. Thankyou sir.
 INTRODUCTION
Children throughout the world are engaged in a great number of activities classifiable as work. These
ranges from fairly harmless, even laudable, activities like helping out in the home, to physically dangerous
and morally objectionable ones like soldiering and prostitution. In the middle, we have the bulk of what is
generally called ‘economic activity’. According to currently available ILO estimates (see Table 1),
throughout the world, 211 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 were ‘economically active’ in the
year 2000. That is a very large proportion, 18 per cent, of the age group. The participation rate is even
higher, 23 per cent, if we include youngsters up to the age of 17. Most of the economically active children
are in developing countries, where the participation rate of the 5–14 age groups ranges between 15 and 29
per cent . The great majority of these children work on the family farm, or otherwise helping parents in
their daily businesses.
Child labour at a very young age, especially for long hours or in poor conditions, interferes with education
and is likely to harm health. On the other hand, formal education is not the only means of accumulating
human capital. Most forms of child labour have learning-by-doing elements. Furthermore, child labour
generates current income. If a family is credit rationed, child labour thus serves to relax the liquidity
constraint on current consumption. If a family cannot buy insurance, child labour serves also as a buffer
against severely adverse events. There are thus trade-offs. To the extent that current consumption has a
positive effect on future health (hence, on the child’s future earning capacity), the trade-off between present
and future consumption may be lower than one might think. In certain circumstances, it might conceivably
be negative. In other words, there may be circumstances in which a child and his family are better off
working than not working.
The individual optimization assumption underlying most economic reasoning implies that one does (on
average) what is best for oneself. Public intervention is thus justified only if it can be shown that it helps
remedy a coordination failure, or on equity grounds. That is true also in relation to child labour (Grootaert
and Kanbur, 1995). Since child labour prevails in less developed countries, there is no shortage of
coordination failures (as evidenced by widespread market imperfections) and lack of social justice. But
there is an additional argument. Young children are not free agents.

Their parents decide for them, and not necessarily in their best interest.

There is no short answer as to how to go about reducing child labour either.

It is widely believed that child labour is caused by poverty. Some economists thus maintain that income
redistribution, from rich to poor countries and from rich to poor households, would do the job. Others
(fewer and fewer) still believe that growth in itself will take care of poverty, hence of child labour. More to
the point, income and child labour are co-determined. The fact that they are observed to move in opposite
directions is thus no guarantee that income redistribution or income growth would be accompanied by a
reduction in child labour. What is true rather is that child labour, especially in its more unsavoury forms, is
part and parcel of the general problem of economic underdevelopment.
CAUSES OF CHILD LABOUR
In order to combat child labour we must understand the forces that give rise to it. We will consider a wide
range of factors whose importance may vary from one situation to the next. Our main interest will be on the
role of families and economic pressures, although other aspects will be considered as well.
To help organize the list of factors, one we could distinguish between “internal” and “external” forces.
Internal forces are those acting within a family to produce particular outcomes such as child labour. An
example would be the health or child-rearing practices of a parent. External forces are those working on
families from the outside, and are therefore likely to affect many families simultaneously. An example of
this would be a national economic crisis.
Another method generally preferred by economists is to sort factors according to whether they operate on
the “supply side” or “demand side” of markets. A market is an institution which brings buyers and sellers
together to determine what will be exchanged at what prices. In the case of child labour, the market
includes those who provide child labour, such as the households the children live in, and those who utilize
it. So demand-side factors refer to those things that make households more or less willing to offer
children’s labour, while the supply side is influenced by employers of this labour. Of course, when the
child is employed within the household the two sets of individuals will be the same, but the factors can still
be distinguished.

1. The family context

In most societies, the family is both the child’s immediate emotional influence and its introduction to living
in society, and then its first avenue of contact with the outside world. Most children start work by helping
their families, before they go out to work for others. They do so partly because of poverty but also, in many
societies, because cultural values and expectations view this as a natural and “right” way to introduce a
child to the roles and responsibilities linked to being a member of a family and to growing up. This occurs
throughout the world in millions of agricultural families. If the family owns land or works on the land of
others, the child will start by spending the day in the fields alongside its parent, doing very easy jobs at first
and then progressively more demanding ones. Where exactly to draw the line between acceptable work for
children and work that is child labour - work that is harmful and/or interferes with the ability to benefit
from education - is not always easy. Often, it is necessary to know the specific circumstances of a case
before one can do so.
In some societies, as many as three quarters of all economically active children under the age of 18 are
unpaid family workers, assisting in both agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises. These are not always
children from the very poorest strata of their societies. In fact, there is some evidence that points to an even
greater need for the children’s help if the farm family is more well-to-do - there is more land and there are
more farm animals to take care of.
There is much less of a tendency for children to help their parents or share their parents’ workload and
workday when the parents work in urban or institutional settings such as factories or offices. In this case, if
a child goes to work, it will probably be in some setting where the family is not present.

2. The role of poverty

It should come as no surprise that the prevalence of child labour is strongly correlated with the average
level of income in a society. This is borne out by the given figure, although care should be taken regarding
the numbers on the vertical axis: clearly these data do not incorporate much of the illegal or hidden child
labour that characterizes even some of the wealthiest countries. The link between poverty and child labour
dominates much of the debate on this topic. Does poverty “cause” child labour, or does child labour
“cause” poverty, or both? If poverty is the culprit, does it make sense to pursue other policies, like national
legislation, as long as poverty persists? Do the poor need child labour to make ends meet?
There is no general answer to questions such as these, because the questions are not posed carefully
enough. The key distinction that needs to be made is between poor countries (or communities) and poor
households. The role of child labour differs dramatically between these two levels.
Poverty at a country level is indeed both a cause and a consequence of child labour. Here we are interested
in it as a consequence. There are two broad reasons why lower-income countries are likely to have more
child labour. Firstly, they are likely to have more households in extreme poverty, a condition which is
conducive to child labour in all its forms. Secondly, it is likely to display the sort of social and economic
patterns that are known to result in higher rates of child labour. What are some of these patterns?
n Widespread expectations in favour of child labour. With relatively few opportunities open to children
with more education, parents are likely to share a cultural norm in which labour is seen as the most
productive use of a child’s time.
n Lower productivity work systems. Countries with low income per head have low productivity per head,
and low productivity tasks are often viewed as being suitable for children.
n Lower quality or less accessible education systems. The provision of high-quality education to all
children is expensive, and poorer countries are often unable to afford it. This means that there is less
incentive or feasibility for parents to direct their children’s time toward school attendance and study.
In order to understand more clearly the relationship between poverty and child labour, we need to shift the
focus from simple numerical comparisons (how many children work in each income group) to a
consideration of why and how the child labour decision differs when subsistence is at stake. For a
household whose basic needs are met, economists would argue that decisions regarding child labour and
schooling would be influenced by perceptions of the costs and benefits of each option. Households would
look at the earnings or productivity of the children working alongside the potential benefits of schooling,
play or other activities. Depending on the balance of these costs and benefits, they would make their
choice. Households whose survival is at issue - those whose poverty is so extreme that basic needs may not
be met - will likely devote all available resources to production. Indeed, the lower the earnings children
receive, the more work they will do, since it takes more work to provide for the necessities of life. Thus,
one way to differentiate the child labour of the very poor and the less- or non-poor is by their responses to
the demand side of the market. It is evident that the poorest households may be caught in what we might
call a survival trap: as employment options deteriorate, they offer ever more child labour to meet their
needs, but the simultaneous decision throughout a community can flood the labour market, leading to even
lower earnings and more children offering their work. The following example describes the problem of
child labour under extreme poverty in Pakistan.
 3. Additional household factors that influence children to
work
Below are some of the family-related factors that influence why a child might work. As discussed above,
they are grouped according to whether they are “internal” to the family or have to do with the interaction
between the family and society at large - although sometimes this may be a difficult and somewhat risky
distinction to make, as in practice many of these factors are related. It is also apparent that some of them
are closely related to family poverty; they will be discussed further below. “Internal” and “external” are in
quotation marks to indicate that the distinction is somewhat artificial.
“Internal” factors
- Difficult family situations: – Single-parent families
- Family illness or incapacity to work
- Dysfunctional families – Unsupportive or unprotective families
- Poor family values
- Low level of education (of the child or the parents)
- Low parental skill level
“External” factors
- Belonging to a minority popula- tion (racial or ethnic) and suffering social exclusion
- Strong peer group and external influences, with material values
- Socio-economic dislocation (economic crisis, political and social transition)
- The effects of HIV/AIDS
- The special situation of girls - this subject will be addressed in Chapter 5

Internal factors

This phrase refers to a number of “misfortunes” that can befall a family. These can be the death or
desertion of a family member, leaving the other (if still alive) - often with few or no skills and many debts -
to support a number of children. Illness can impoverish a family, and if the breadwinner falls ill, the family
can end up destitute. The parents may be permanently unable to work for health or mental health reasons. A
dysfunctional family is one plagued by alcohol or drug abuse, violence, or sexual abuse. The remarriage of
a parent often gives rise to friction, as the stepparent is sometimes unsympathetic to the children, if not
abusive. All these factors can result in unsupportive and unprotective families for children, and can tend to
push the children into early (or earlier) work, and perhaps abandonment of the household as well.
Difficult family situations have been found to “push” children into the labour market in a number of
studies. In a study of street children in three Turkish cities, 28 of the 65 families interviewed included
members who were seriously ill and had no health insurance or social security. The existence of health
problems along with poverty created a sense of hopelessness among these families, which resulted in
economically, socially and psychologi- cally insecure environments for the children.
Family disorganization or dysfunction can be precipitated by the family’s continuing poor socio-economic
status over a period of years with no hope of improvement, but this can become a vicious circle and itself
contribute to the perpetuation of low economic returns and low status. One frequent result is that the child
can be encouraged to work by the family, even obliged to do so, or can choose to work as a way of
contributing to the family’s survival. In 18 per cent of the families interviewed for this study, there was
only one parent, and the child became the de facto bread- winner (to the point where the burden became too
great and some simply left home altogether to live on the streets). But even when there are two parents, the
study found evidence of dysfunctional behaviour in the form of alcohol consumption, gambling and
violence. Moreover, most parents got used to being supported by their children over time, and eventually
their children’s work became the only source of income in the family. Punishments and abuse - particularly
by the father - ensued if the child did not bring any money home: the children were subjected to sleep- or
food-deprivation as well as beatings. Studies from a number of countries report punishments by the parents
if work- ing children fail to come home with money, even when the child is not the family’s only income
earner.

External factors:

The influence of society

In some countries, many of the families who send their children to work belong to minority populations,
often ethnic or religious minorities but perhaps also racially diverse populations, and they may have been
socially marginalized and denigrated by the surrounding population for generations. Other minority
populations are migrants who have established themselves in a new country and are “assigned” a similar
low status. Often, poverty is especially acute among such groups. In general, the fate of their children and
young people in the labour market reflects this low social position, and children from socially excluded
groups may find themselves at the very bottom of the pile. In Southeast Asia and India, they come from the
ethnic or tribal minorities living in isolated hill areas, or from ethnically distinct and more impoverished
populations living in the rural backwaters of neighbouring countries.
More and more studies of children and work mention a sometimes insidious “pull” factor - the desire for
material goods and the need for the money with which to buy them: consumerism. This desire functions on
two levels, that of the whole family and that of the children themselves. In countries and regions across the
world, families want the refrigerators and TVs that make life easier - or at least make their poverty more
bearable. Sending children to work is a way to augment family income and make some of these purchases
possible. For their part, many children work in order to be able to buy themselves the good clothing and
high tech electronics now advertised everywhere. The children who can give in to these seductions are
already the more fortunate ones: their families can do without the income they earn (or are obliged to earn)
and it is theirs to spend on themselves. There is some evidence that boys are generally more prone than
girls to directly consuming the products of their labour rather than turning it over to their families.
Another source (and result) of the desire for material posses- sions is the rapid change sweeping through
some societies, where a desire for increased consumption or a better, more com- fortable life motivates
adults and children to leave rural areas where incomes are low, in the hope of finding more rewarding
opportunities in the cities. Children are part of this movement and urban-based child labour is often a
result. Another category of “external” factor on the list above is socio-economic dislocation, meaning
economic crisis, and political and social transition. dealing with child labour and are ill-equipped to devise
effective responses.
Finally, a shock that is neither economic nor political but is deeply destabilizing is the HIV/AIDS
epidemic. It has deprived many millions of children, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, of their parents,
older siblings, and relatives in a long wasting dis- ease that has taken its toll before their eyes. There are an
estimated (and increas- ing) 13 million AIDS orphans under the age of 15, many now living in child-
headed households. Children burdened in this way are obliged to abandon their schooling in order to
maintain the household, work the family’s land or seek out other income-producing opportunities. Many
migrate to the cities to work in the informal sector, and thousands become drawn into commercial sexual
exploitation with its easier earnings but its risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

4. Economic shocks
It is not just the level of household income that matters for child labour, but also its fluctuations. Over the
course of a year or several years, a household may have an adequate income overall, but there may be
periods of distress. This is particularly the case with small-scale agriculture, when market income depends
on a single crop, which may be subject to weather or pest disturbances, changing prices, or other
unforeseeable events. However, no household is truly insulated from shocks to its well-being. Accidents or
disease may strike, a wage earner may lose his or her job, or a storm may damage the house or other assets.
At times such as these, the pressure to put all hands to work increases. Indeed, evidence derived from many
countries shows that economic shocks are a significant contributor to the rate of child labour. Yet, while the
household emergency may be temporary, the con- sequences may be permanent, since research also shows
that children who leave school to work full-time often fail to return.
There are two key issues concerning shocks: how to prevent them, and how to mitigate them. As for the
first, no set of policies can ever eliminate shocks altogether, but the law of large numbers is worth bearing
in mind: while each individual household’s well-being is virtually unpredictable, many common shocks
have a statistical regularity at the community level. This makes it possible to take preventive action, even
before we know who the specific beneficiaries will be. Other sources of shocks can also be addressed at the
level of the community or nation. Agricultural policies can strive to minimize short-term commodity price
fluctuations. Prudent macro-economic policies can minimize the likelihood of currency disruptions.
Policies that pool the resources of small producers, such as the formation of cooperatives or mutual aid
groups, can have a similar effect. In all these cases, the sign of success is not economic growth or poverty
reduction in any general sense - although these are of course desirable - but a smoothing out of household
income over time.
When it comes to the mitigation of shocks, there are two main sets of programmes, insurance and credit.
Insurance programmes are based on the risk-pooling principle: a group of people, not knowing who will
ultimately succumb to the risk, agree to each make a small payment, with the proceeds going to indemnify
the costs for those affected. Thus, each makes a small, predictable sacrifice rather than undergoing the risk
of a large, unpredictable one. Such insurance programmes can either be private or public. In principle, there
should be little cost, since, if the information on which the programme is based is correct, the payments
made by the community (either in the form of premiums or taxes) should finance the payouts. (If the risk
affects the whole community at once, like a major storm, for instance, this may not be the case.) Thus, the
provision of insurance to mitigate the most important risks - ill-health, loss of employment, localized crop
failures - can be an important instrument in the struggle against child labour.
The second way households can be protected from shocks is through the availability of credit. In this case,
a household in a temporary emergency can borrow money with the promise of repayment once the
emergency lifts. (Obviously, this is only feasible if the emergency really is temporary; it will not apply to
permanent shocks like an unexpected death.) Logically, a household with such an option is less likely to
resort to child labour than one which has no other way to augment its current income. Research bears this
out: access to credit is one factor that explains why some low-income households supply child labour and
others do not. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to expand the availability of credit, since poor households
are typically unable to provide the collateral that lenders require. This leads to two further problems.
n Unable to convince lenders that they are creditworthy, or un- able to find more than one lender to borrow
from, households may sometimes pay usurious interest rates. This can lead to a downward spiral in which
ever more resources must be funnelled into debt payments, so that extreme poverty is unavoidable. Worst
forms of child labour, driven by desperation, can result.
n In some cases, the main form of collateral available to parents is their own children. If the family is
unable to repay a loan, its children become the property of the lender. This is the
process at the heart of bonded labour, the worst form. Here the solution (credit) is the problem.

5. More about parents and their working children

Some of the examples above indicate that in poorer countries where the child’s income is needed, it is most
often the parents who make the decision between work and school for their children. Parents’ expectations
that children will provide for them in their old age may lead to their having larger numbers of children and,
where household incomes are limited, there may be a lower level of investment in each child, including in
education. Parents may genuinely believe that they are doing what is best for their children by allowing or
encouraging them to work. It is at this critical point that the choice may be made about whether to send a
boy or a girl to school or to work. Issues such as the status of girls and women, and their marriage and work
prospects, also play a role in such decisions.
Parents in the developing world sometimes arrange for their children’s employment. This can occur in
various ways. Mention has already been made of children working to pay off their parents’ debts (debts
incurred for reasons usually having nothing to do with the child). This is a contractual obligation, always
illegal, in which the child’s labour becomes an integral part of a financial relationship. The child’s consent
is not sought.
In Thailand and Nepal, the parents and sometimes relatives play a part in enrolling children as domestic
workers. Parents will rarely use a broker to do this. Brokers or agents are used in situations where large
distances must be travelled or where the parents have no connections in the city or town where the child
will be employed.
The attitude of the family regarding the commercial sexual exploitation of its children can vary greatly
from place to place and family to family. If a daughter is trafficked, the family may be unaware of her
whereabouts or activities but perhaps continue to yearn for contact. There are stories of fathers selling the
family’s only farm animal to pay for travel to the city to try to recover a daughter from brothel owners,
without success because the brothel owner has paid an agent or trafficker for the girl and refuses to return
her until he is repaid by her labour - and the father most often cannot afford to repay this sum. In the case
of boys’ commercial sexual activity, some families (but not all) remain in denial that their sons are engaged
in sexual encounters with men. They think they are just “friends”, and sometimes if the men are foreign
tourists, the contact may actually be regarded favourably.
Children working in sexually exploitative activities usually try to hide their source of income from their
families even if they are giving the family money; they invent an alibi. Girls more than boys will try to
retain their close connection with their family, and tend more to send remittances home. Boys who have
moved away remain in less frequent contact and share their earnings less.

6. Demand-side factors in child labour

As we have seen, the bulk of the research has focused on the supply side. The entire question of poverty,
for example, is concerned with the role that lack of income plays in convincing households to put their
children to work. Similarly, the analysis of family structure is intended to explain which children from
which households will be instructed or encouraged to work. Nevertheless, demand side factors should not
be slighted. The manner in which a society’s production is organized can have a profound effect on the
prospects of its children.
An initial question to be asked is whether the tasks assigned to children are similar to those performed by
adults, or whether there are few opportunities to substitute the labour of one for the other. This is of great
importance, since only if the potential for substitutability is high, will it be relatively easy to phase out child
labour. Moreover, in such situations the presence of chil- dren in the workplace can have a depressing
effect on the demand for adults - even their own parents. Thus, the costs of child labour are greater and the
barriers to eliminating it are less. But if children perform specialized tasks, there may be less im- pact on
adult labour markets, and the withdrawal of child labour may result in economic disruption.
The general response to this question is, not surprisingly, that the answer depends on the context. Much
research into the employ- ment of children in the carpet industry, for instance, has found that child and
adult labour is largely interchangeable, and that there is no particular advantage (and of course much social
disadvantage) to assigning the work to children. This appears to be the case, in fact, in most manufacturing
employments. On the other hand, children often perform simple, low-productivity but nonetheless
necessary tasks in household agriculture, such as routine feeding of farm animals, hulling grain, and so on.
It might be impractical for adult labour, which may already be fully occupied with more demanding tasks,
to be further stretched so as to replace children. In addition, many small-scale enterprises, such as in
services and construction, are organized to take advan- tage of the availability of children, relying on them
for “helping” activities.
STUDY, MODEL AND DISCUSSION:
CHILD LABOUR IN RURAL INDIA

Table 2 shows that school enrolment in rural India is relatively high. About 65 per cent of children in the 6–16
age range attend school, but the enrolment rate of males is 15 percentage points higher than that of females. The
same table tells us that about 15 per cent of children are engaged in either paid or unpaid work. But work and
school attendance are neither exclusive nor exhaustive descriptions of children’s activities. A majority of children
do either one or the other, a few do both, many apparently do neither. It is important to note that less than 7 per
cent of the age group work outside the household, and only about half of that receive wages in money or in kind.
Directly or indirectly, the great majority of working children are employed by their own parents, helping in the
family farm or in the family business, helping friends, and neighbours on a reciprocity basis, or performing
domestic chores.

Table 3 shows that the proportion of children who work only rises with age, while the proportion of
children working and studying at the same time has a U-shaped profile. This indicates that some children
enter the labour force initially without leaving school, but tend to leave education as they get into their
teens.

Summing up, the data show that child work is an important phenomenon, particularly if we count as work
also the domestic chores carried out mostly by girls. Almost as important is the phenomenon of children
reported doing nothing. Working children appear to fare better, in terms of current nutrition, than children
who study. As children who study will enter adult life with a larger stock of human capital, there is an
obvious trade-off between present and future consumption. For children who combine work with study, the
size of this trade-off will depend on the extent to which work reduces educational achievement, but HDI is
silent on the subject, and evidence from other countries is somewhat discordant.

PARENTAL DECISIONS AND CHILD LABOUR

Reproductive decisions will take into account the number of children of different ages who are already
there, hence that decisions concerning the treatment of any particular child may be affected by the presence
of elder or younger siblings. It also implies that higher-stage decisions may be affected by exogenous
variables that, in the theoretical analysis, figure only at lower-stage decisions. For example, decisions
concerning a school-age child may be influenced by policies that, in the theory, affect only the survival
probability of the children. We will try and explain the probability that the child will study only, work only,
work and study, or do neither. The theory explains the choice of the last alternative with the existence of
fixed costs.

In the present context, it seems reasonable to assume that parents have neither access to credit, nor
significant assets they can readily sell. The solution is thus a point on the domestic production frontier. The
kinked curve through points I and L in Fig.1 represents this frontier for a given configuration of
parameters. If the solution is at point I, the child works only. If it is a point between I and L, the child
works and studies. If it is at or above point L, the child studies only. We shall use this diagram to illustrate
the effects of some parameter changes. A lump-sum increase in the household’s full income would shift the
frontier outwards, without changing the position of h0 and h1. The new frontier would then look like the
kinked curve through points I$ and L$. As we do not have the indifference map, we do not know on which
point of the domestic frontier the solution will fall, either before or after the parameter change. We can talk,
however, about the probability that the solution will be in one segment or other of the frontier. In this case,
the probability of a study-only solution (h " h1) increases, and that of a work-and-study (h0 < h < h1) or
work-only (h = h0)
solution decreases. Now suppose that the marginal opportunity cost of the child’s time rises, but this
change is compensated by a lump-sum tax calculated to maintain the household’s full income constant. The
new frontier will look like the kinked curve through points I and M. Notice that h1 has moved upwards,
because parents economize on the child’s time, and that the linear segment of the frontier has become less
steep, because q has increased. In this case, the probability of a work-and-study solution (h " h1) increases,
and that of a study-only or work-only solution decreases. Finally consider the effect of a rise in the
marginal return to education. In Fig.2, the original frontier is again represented by the kinked curve through
the kinked curve through I and L. The new frontier looks like the kinked curve through I and L$,
everywhere steeper than the one through I and L. The probability of studying only will raise that of
working and studying at the same time or working only decreases.

DISCUSSION AND MODEL

We have found that a marginal increase in full household income—proxied land ownership—raises
substantially the probability that a child in the relevant age range will attend school, and reduces
substantially the probability that he or she will be reported doing nothing, but has little effect on the
probability that the child will either work and study, or work only. We have also found that it raises the
nutritional status of children, and the amount spent on a child’s education conditional on attending school.
This helps explain why the raw data show that child labour participation decreases more slowly, as
household income increases, than the share of ‘idle’ children, and that it remains high even in households
of the top income quintile (see Table 5.3). Since, for any given number of births, the number of school-age
children increases with nutrition, an implication of these findings is that income redistribution is not a very
effective way of reducing the child labour participation rate, even less of reducing the absolute number of
child workers. On the other hand, income redistribution has a number of desirable effects. It reduces
inequality. It reduces the number of children reported as neither working nor attending school, and thus at
risk of being sold or bonded. It improves the nutritional status of children, and thus presumably reduces
morbidity and premature mortality. Last but not least, it increases the amount of time and money invested
in education.

Land size is found to have a negative marginal effect on the probability that Land size is found to have a
negative marginal effect on the probability that a child studies only, and a positive one on the probability
that the child works only, or combines work with study. The effect on the amount that parents spend on a
child’s education, conditional on the child attending school, is not significant. With family composition
controlled for, the amount of land farmed by the family is a proxy for the marginal product of child labour.
With poverty and land tenure controlled for, an increase in land size is thus equivalent to an increase in the
child wage rate, accompanied by a lump-sum tax such that full household income remains constant.
Redistributing land without redistributing income would thus have the effect of lowering the marginal rate
of return to education in families that, before the policy, had little or no land, and of raising it in families
that, before the policy, had a lot of land. The policy would then raise child labour participation in the
families that receive land, and lower it in those that have land taken from them. Since most of the children
are in the first category of families, aggregate child labour participation would then rise. For the same
reason, aggregate infant mortality would fall. Child labour would thus rise not only as a proportion of the
number of school-age children, but also in absolute terms. Historically, however, land redistribution has
been accompanied by some measure of full-income redistribution in the same direction. In the history of
land reform, land has in fact been confiscated from large land owners and given to landless peasants with
little or no compensation for the former, and little or no charge for the latter. In child labour terms, this
policy will have been less detrimental than pure land redistribution, but it is hard to believe that it was
actually beneficial. In rural India, where full household income appears to have little effect on the
probability that a child works, it would make little difference whether land were redistributed with or
without compensatory income transfers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1) Child labour: a textbook for university students- By International Labour Office 
2) Cover story - Stolen childhoods (by Jayati Ghosh)
3) The economics of Child Labour By Alessandro Cigno and Furio Camillo Rosati

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