Rights and Wrongs of Children's Work

5. Work in Children’s Development

are intimately related to material factors. Culture cannot therefore be considered independently as an explanation for harmful work. Other studies have argued that the dominant factor when children work instead of attending school is lack of resources (e.g., Bissell, 2004; Lieten, 2000, 2177). Nevertheless, social expectations and values do influence decisions on children’s schooling and work, and intervention should take this into consideration. The dominance of girls in reproductive work and of boys in labor-market work reflect cultural values. In the next chapter we will discuss how different ideas about childhood are reflected in different work patterns of children. The Effects of Child Work on Poverty Dynamics: How Learning Matters Part of the difficulty in determining whether poverty causes child work is due to the fact that child work can also affect well-being of children and their family members, in the present but also in the future. That is, there can also be a causal effect from child work to poverty. In the present, for example, the earnings or in-kind payments for child work may improve her own and her family’s nutritional levels. In the future, however, the effects may be more substantial. These longer-term effects may be positive or negative, or combine elements of both. It is generally assumed that longer-term effects are predominantly negative, to the extent that work reduces children’s educational attainment and thus keeps them from acquiring skills that would allow them to get better jobs in the future.11 Economists have long been exploring the relationships between certain aspects of human development, with special attention to children and youth, and national social and economic development, in what is known as the human capital literature. The driving idea is that healthier and more skilled populations contribute more to society and the economy. For this purpose, child development is defined very narrowly in terms of measurable education and health variables that can be analyzed to gauge their contributions to national economic development . Such analyses have generally found that investments in children’s education , especially universal primary education, provide extraordinary economic and social returns that are difficult to match from any other kind of investment (e.g., Psacharopoulos, 1997). Investments in children’s healthy physical development through immunization, nutrition, disease prevention, and similar programs also turn out to be highly productive in national economic terms. The United Nations tracks certain national statistics pertinent to this human capital perspective, and reports them annually through two publications: the UNDP’s Human Development Report and UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children. There is reason to believe that estimates using human capital approaches may substantially overstate the effects of education on future earnings. Most estimates fail to take account of school quality, but children are likely to stay in RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF CHILDREN’S WORK 84 school longer if they are learning something. Glewwe (1996) argues that it is more useful to estimate rates of return to investments in school quality. Neither do most estimates control for individual ability, although children with greater academic abilities are likely to stay in school longer. A further problem has to do with the assumption that very high rates of return to an additional year of schooling will continue, even if entire cohorts of children enter school instead of the most advantaged children. Once everyone has completed primary school, having a primary certificate will not confer particular advantage on anyone, and the measured return to primary education is likely to fall substantially. From a rigorously economic perspective on child development, the primary concern about children’s work has been that it may detract from their schooling, and the corresponding high national social and economic returns such schooling provides, or result in poor health and nutrition that drive up national medical expenses and reduce worker productivity in adulthood. Emerson points out that most economists assume that such negative relationships exists. Yet, as he points out, “Though almost every theoretical study of child labor posits a fairly rigid relationship between child work and diminished human capital, there is very little empirical evidence to support or refute this assumption” (Emerson, 2009, 8). A few studies using Colombian and Brazilian data suggest that early school-leaving and/or starting work at a young age have long-term negative effects on earnings due to reduced education; while positive effects of experience exist as well, these are overwhelmed by the education effect (Knaul, 1998; Emerson and Souza, 2007; Ilahi...