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The idea that parenthood has differential effects on women and men is not new. However, recent work has developed new and transparent ways of estimating the magnitude of child penalties--the [...]

From 1980 to 2000, child labor rates across the world fell by more than a quarter. Much of the explanation for this decrease resides in development processes broadly associated with the demographic transition. Net of these internal dynamics, however, globalization may also have played a role. Previous studies have examined the effect of trade and investment flows on child labor rates. However, the impact of cultural models spread by world polity institutions has yet to be examined. In this study, I argue that international organizations have confronted child labor practices, diffusing a 'labor-to-schooling' model of child development. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with 428 observations from 116 states across four waves during the 1980-2000 period, I assess the impact of economic and cultural globalization on a state's child labor rate using random effects tobit models. Net of a country's development experience, I find that foreign investment exerts a small, positive effect on child labor, while international organizations exert a larger negative effect. These results are robust to a number of specifications, including first-difference models that restrict attention to longitudinal variation., Introduction Child labor rates across the world have been in rapid decline since the 1950s (Basu 1999). A number of development processes broadly associated with the demographic transition are likely [...]

Street hawking in its simplest form is the selling of things along the roads and from one place to the other. In Nigeria this is done almost all the time [...]

Byline: Diganta Mukherjee (1), Saswati Das (2) Keywords: School drop out; Child labour; Manual work; Harmful work; Education; NSSO; India Abstract: This paper uses household level data from National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of India, the 55th (1999--2000) and the 61st (2004--05) rounds, to show that even with a significant wage incentive for schooling of urban children, the school drop out rate and child labour incidence are not small over this period. The parents' level of education plays an important role in reducing this tendency thus establishing the linkage between social and human capital outcomes in the family. We also look at the incidence of harmful and manual occupations among the child labour. Mother's education appears as the more important factor in the recent round in curbing the manual work incidences supporting earlier findings that women's empowerment (one important indicator of which would be female educational level) is indeed becoming instrumental in increasing parental awareness. Using a pooled data set, we have also analysed the changes in the impact of parental education on these decisions between 1999--2000 and 2004--05. Author Affiliation: (1) ICFAI Business School Kolkata, Plot J-3, Block GP, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata, 700 091, India (2) Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India Article History: Registration Date: 18/12/2007 Received Date: 28/11/2007 Accepted Date: 18/12/2007 Online Date: 03/01/2008

Problem: Many children in Albania and other countries of Eastern Europe are being trafficked as part of the global business of human trafficking. Objectives: The study sought to identify the patterns of child trafficking involving Albanian children, and especially children's views of the role of family issues and the nature of the trafficking experience. Method: The study included verbally administered questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and use of already existing reports. Study participants included 61 children who had escaped from trafficking, 22 children from similar at-risk groups who had not been trafficked, 15 parents of currently or previously trafficked children, 10 parents from similar groups whose children had not been trafficked, and 8 key informants. Results: Children at greatest risk of trafficking had very limited education and frequently were working on the streets. Their families were poor with many interpersonal problems, including violence. They typically belonged to the Gypsy community. Trusted community members usually recruited the children by promising that the children would work to help the family financially. Once abroad, the children were harshly treated, forced to work long hours, physically abused, and isolated from family members. Families did not receive the promised payment. Once returned, children had a difficult time reentering due to family, educational, and economic issues. Conclusions: Contextual issues supporting child trafficking in Albania include poverty, major internal and external migrations, discrimination, and problems in the legal system. Poverty combined with family problems and membership in the marginalized Gypsy group places children at increased risk of trafficking into harsh labor conditions. Practice implications: The study of Albanian children who were trafficked suggests that dealing with trafficking of children requires addressing family problems and complex social issues that perpetuate poverty as well as the legal and social structures that place children at risk and continue to marginalize certain communities. As a result, changes in social policies that protect victims and punish traffickers and the development of programs that facilitate integration and promote the economic and interpersonal welfare of families whose children are at-risk have been established in Albania. Keywords: Child trafficking Child abuse Albania

The economic contribution of children to their parents' households has long interested demographers because of its potential to influence fertility levels. Valuing children's labour in pre-industrial economies, however, is inherently difficult. The same is true of women's labour, a crucial component of any analysis of net production. Here we use Mead Cain's seminal study (Population and Development Review 3(3): 201-227, 1977) of children's economic contributions in a Bangladeshi village to illustrate these points. We combine Cain's data on landless women's and men's hours of work with data on the efficiency per hour of work from other pre-industrial settings (Mueller, Population and Development: The Search for Selective Interventions Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 98-153, 1976; Kramer, Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1998). When women's labour is incorporated, we find that the Bangladeshi children begin to produce as much as they consume by ages 10 (girls) or 11 (boys). Despite these productive contributions, neither women nor men 'pay' for their cumulative consumption until their early 20s. We believe our methods could be usefully applied in other contexts. Keywords: child worth; value of children; women's work; Bangladesh; Mead Cain; Maya

A study was conducted to establish the relationship between regional returns to education and children's participation in work and school. Findings indicate that low schooling and high child labor will persist among credit constrained families unless households are provided with the economic ability to respond to the benefits of education.

Objectives. We investigated the links between working for pay and adolescent tobacco use to determine whether working for pay increases smoking risk. Methods. We performed retrospective and prospective analyses using data from a cohort of 799 predominantly African American students in Baltimore, Md, who had been followed since the first grade. Results. At the 10th year of follow-up, when the adolescents were aged 14 to 18 years, there was a positive relationship between the time they spent working for pay and current tobacco use. This relationship was attenuated somewhat after adjustment for potential selection effects. Adolescents who spent more than 10 hours per week working for pay also tended to initiate tobacco use earlier than did their peers. Among adolescents who had not yet used tobacco, those who started to work 1 year after assessment and those who worked over 2 consecutive assessments had an elevated risk of initiating use relative to adolescents who did not start working. Conclusions. There is a strong link between working for pay and adolescent tobacco use. Policymakers should monitor the conditions under which young people work to help minimize young workers' tobacco use and potential for initiating use. (doi:10.2105/AJPH.2006.094045)

Baland and Robinson (2000) [Baland, J.-M., Robinson, J.A., 2000. Is child labour inefficient? Journal of Political Economy 108 (4), 663-681] developed a model of child labour in which child labour can be inefficiently high when parents are credit constrained. We show here that, when return to human capital is uncertain and insurance are incomplete, the level of child labour can be inefficiently high even when parents are not credit constrained and bequests are interior. JEL classification: D61; D80; d91; J13; J24 Keywords: Child labour; Uncertainty; Imperfect markets

Undernutrition, pathogenic agents, and poor living conditions are of primary importance in the evaluation of adverse environmental conditions' effects on human growth; but child labor (an equally significant factor, especially in underdeveloped countries) is generally overlooked or ignored. The aim of this study is to focus on this subject and clarify the effects of labor on the physical growth and nutritional status of child and adolescent laborers. In this study, the height and weight of 532 male adolescent laborers aged 13.5-18.5 years and their nonlaboring peers (n = 451) (the control group) were measured by standard anthropometric techniques and equipment. The individuals of both groups come from lower socioeconomic strata and share similar living conditions. Data were transformed to z-scores, using the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2000 growth charts. The analyses show that the z-scores for height-forage, weight-for-age, and body mass index (BMI)-for-age were negative in both groups. The z-scores of laborers' height-for-age and weight-for-age values lie below the controls', but there is no significant difference between the two groups' BMI-for-age scores. In the laboring group, the percentages of stunting (-2 SD of height-for-age), underweight t 2 SD of weight-for-age), and wasting (-2 SD of BMI-for-age) were 14.3, 2.6, and 0.2, respectively. These values suggest that malnutrition is not a common problem among adolescent laborers living in Ankara; but laboring is an important cause of faltering in growth, particularly in linear growth, in less or underdeveloped economic environments. KEY WORDS child labor; adolescent growth; nutritional status; physical stress

Though children's labor has been critical to African economies historically, Africanist scholars tend to treat child and adolescent workers as invisible. In this essay, the reasons for this neglect are explored, as are the consequences of such neglect for theory and empirical research. Suggestions are made for pursuing research on child and adolescent labor that places young workers within the broader context of economic, social, and political relationships and processes. The essay critically reviews the extant scholarly literature on children and work in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and concludes that child labor is either underresearched or undertheorized to the detriment of our understanding of gender, patriarchy, agency, the formation of worker and political consciousness, capital accumulation, and the state. The essay argues that children have shaped and continue to shape history in Africa and that childhood is a terrain of struggle in which numerous social and political forces (including children, patriarchy, capital, and the state) seek constructions that suit their particular (and changing) interests. The essay makes a plea to Africanist scholars to take children more seriously in their research. Bien que, d'un point de vue historique, le travail des enfants ait ete capital pour l'economie des pays africains, les chercheurs africanistes ont tendance a traiter les travailleurs enfants et adolescents comme s'ils etaient invisibles. Dans cet article, nous examinons les raisons de cette negligence, ainsi que les consequences d'une telle negligence pour la recherche theorique et empirique. Nous proposons des pistes de recherche sur le travail des enfants et des adolescents, qui situent ces jeunes travailleurs dans le contexte plus large des relations et processus economiques, sociaux et politiques. Cet article etablit un examen critique des publications universitaires existantes sur l'enfance et le travail dans les periodes precoloniale, coloniale et post-coloniale, et conclut que le travail des enfants est soit sous-recherche, soit sous-theorise au detriment de notre comprehension du genre, du patriarcat, de l'instrumentalisation, de la formation de la conscience politique et des travailleurs, de l'accumulation du capital et de l'etat. Nous soutenons dans cet article que les enfants ont faconne, et qu'ils continuent a faconner l'histoire de l'Afrique, et que l'enfance est un terrain de lutte sur lequel un grand nombre de forces sociales et politiques (y compris les enfants, le patriarcat, le capital et l'etat) recherchent des c'onstructions qui correspondent a leurs interets particuliers (et changeants). Cet article implore les chercheurs africanistes de considerer les enfants plus serieusement dans l'exercice de leur recherche.

Drawing on ethnographic data from rural Bolivia and applying the theoretical approaches of the minority group child and the tribal child (James et al., 1998), this article shows that majority world children integrate work, play and school, moving back and forth between child and adult-centred worlds. It argues that majority world children have largely been perceived in relation to their work, and that the overlapping arenas of their everyday lives tend to be ignored. A more holistic perspective which considers how they may combine work and school with play could be more appropriate for understanding children's childhoods. KEY WORDS Bolivia / childhood culture / majority world / play / work

Children's time allocation to schooling and labor have been researched for the Okavango Peoples of Botswana. Factors significantly influencing children's school attendance include availability of alternative productive tasks, birth order, parental marital status, and the presence of similarly aged children of the same sex in the household.

This paper examines features of child labor in an area of high economic growth in western India. Growth was associated with an increase in the number of child workers over the last 15 years. The analysis shows that children work at simple repetitive manual tasks that do not require long years of training or experience. The work is low-paying, involves drudgery and is hazardous. Work forecloses the option of school education for most children. In this context, I argue that economic growth alone is not sufficient to eradicate child labor. Key words - child labor, poverty, employment, wages, Asia, India

Reliance upon unpaid and committed family labour is said to make many ethnic businesses competitive. However, most analysts' references to this labour have not taken into account the nature of family members' and, in particular, children's work roles or the ways in which their labour is elicited and maintained. Here, the nature of children's labour participation in ethnic businesses is investigated in the case of families running Chinese take-away businesses in Britain. This article focuses on how children in these families understand their often double-edged experiences of 'helping out', as part of a 'family work contract', and on the ways in which families negotiate children's labour over time. Given these families' experiences of migration and ethnic minority status, I argue that Chinese children's work in take-away businesses must be examined in relation to the intersections of family obligations and relationships, livelihood strategies and pressures, and issues of cultural identity. Keywords: Ethnic business; children; Chinese; 'helping out'; 'family work contract'; cultural identity.