Is there an association between child work and cognitive ability? Evidence from Peru (original) (raw)

The impact of children's work on schooling: Multi-country evidence

International Labour Review, 2005

See Basu (1999), Basu and Tzannatos (2002) and Bhalotra and Tzannatos (2002) for recent surveys of the literature on child labour. provides multi-country evidence on this issue, which is of national and international concern. The countries chosen are Belize, Cambodia, Namibia, Panama, Philippines, Portugal, and Sri Lanka. The children, who are considered here, are those in the age group 12-14 years. The choice of this age group is due to the fact that the minimum age for "light work" is set at twelve for countries "whose economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed" (ILO Convention 138, Art. 2) and thirteen in other countries. The results of the present study add to the growing evidence on the welfare cost that child labour entails on human capital. Previous investigations include the studies of Patrinos and Psacharopoulos (1995) on Paraguay, Akabayashi and Psacharopoulos (1999) on Tanzania, Singh (1998) on the U.S.A., Heady (2000) on Ghana and Rosati and Rossi (2001) on child labour data from Pakistan and Nicaragua. 2. The general consensus that emerges from the results of these studies is that child labour is harmful to human capital accumulation. For example, using time-log data of children from a Tanzanian household survey, Akabayashi and Psacharopoulos (1999) observe (p.120) "that a trade off between hours of work and study exists….(;) hours of work are negatively correlated to reading and mathematical skills through the reduction of human capital investment activities". Heady (2000) similarly observes on Ghanaian data that "work has a substantial effect on learning achievement in the key areas of reading and mathematics….these results confirm the accepted wisdom of the negative effects of work on education". Rosati and Rossi (2001), using data from Pakistan and Nicaragua, conclude that an increase in the hours worked by children significantly affects their human capital accumulation. Ray (2000c), using information on educational attainment from the 50th round (July, 1993-June, 1994) of India's National Sample Survey found that, in both rural and urban areas, the sample of children involved in economic activities recorded a lower mean level of educational experience than non-working children.

Impact of Working Time on Children’s Health

2004

This paper looks in detail at the relationship between the intensity of children's work (i.e., children's weekly working hours) and children's health outcomes, making use of household survey data from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Cambodia. The paper focuses only on the subset of children at work in economic activity. It relies on two sets of measures: self-reported health problems and injuries.The

The Relation Between Maternal Work Hours and the Cognitive Development of Young School-Aged Children

De Economist, 2014

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Is Child Work Detrimental to the Educational Achievement of Children? Results from Young Lives Study in Ethiopia

Ethiopian Journal of Economics, 2017

The objective of this study was to explore the effect of child work on educational achievement as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Identifying the causal effects of child work on education is made difficult because the choice of work and/or schooling is made simultaneously and may be determined by the same potentially unobserved factors. Therefore, both Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation methods were used to identify the effect of child work on educational achievement. We used dummy variables for drought, crop failure and pests and diseases, for increases in the prices of food, and for urban locality as instruments which are highly, though not directly, correlated with achievement in education. The results obtained showed that child work had a negative effect on child achievement in education. Numerically, an increase in the number of hours worked per day by one resulted in a reduction in the PPVT score of a child by 6.2 perc...

Impact of Children's Work on School Attendance and Performance: A Review of School Survey Evidence from Five Countries

The study helps to understand the nature of the impact of work on the school attendance and performance of children by examining the relationship between children's involvement in work, on one hand, and levels of school attendance and performance, on the other, using data from school-based surveys conducted with ILO/IPEC support in Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Turkey. The study will contribute to a broader effort to more effectively identify and target work that is damaging to children's development. It will address two related questions of direct relevance for setting standards relating to child involvement in work (economic activity and/or household chores): first, the extent to which involvement in work is compatible with education; and, second, the time threshold(s) beyond which work interferes with schooling. It will also help provide an empirical basis for recommendations on maximum permissible working time for "light" and

Is child work a deterrent to school attendance and school attainment?

International Journal of Social Economics, 2011

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to examine the linkages between child work and both school attendance and school attainment of children aged 5‐17 years using data from a survey based in rural Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approachThis paper first looks at school attendance as an indicator of a child's time input in schooling; then it measures the “schooling‐for‐age” as a learning achievement or schooling outcome using logistic regression models.FindingsThe results from this paper show that school attendance and grade attainment are lower for children who are working. The gender‐disaggregated estimates show that probability of grade attainment is lower for girls than that of boys. The results further reveal that child work has the highest impact on schooling of Bangladeshi children, followed by supply side correlates (presence of a school in the community), parental education and household income, respectively.Practical implicationsThe results obtained in this paper are of intere...