International audienceIn Nigeria, the most populated African country, rural electrification is a critical issue because of the low household electrification rate and the poor quality of the grid. This energy poverty has harmful economic and social consequences in rural areas, such as low productivity , lack of income-generating opportunities and poor housing conditions. In this paper, we consider electrification as a technical shock that may affect household time allocation. Using the 2010-2011 General Household Survey, we investigate how electrification affects female and male labor supply decisions within rural households in Nigeria. Focusing on husband-wife data, we consider potential dependence in spouses' labor supply decisions and address the challenge of zero hours of work using a recent copula-based bivariate hurdle model (Deb et al. 2013). In addition, an instrumental variable strategy helps identify the causal effect of elec-trification. Our results underline that this dependence in spouses' labor supply decisions is critical to consider when assessing the impact of electrification on these outcomes. Electrifi-cation increases the working time of both spouses in the separate assessments, but the joint analysis emphasizes only a positive effect of electrification on husbands' working time. In line with the household labor supply approach, our findings highlight that, within the household, the labor supply decisions of one spouse significantly affect those of the other spouse. Thus, if we neglect the effect of electrification on the spouse of the individual examined, we may fail to assess how this individual has been actually affected by this common shock on both spouses. Our results suggest that these within-household relationships promote husbands' working time at the expense of wives' working time

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Given objectives set by countries to realize energy-savings and decrease greenhouse gas emissions, an understanding of the main factors driving household energy consumption is crucial for the formulation of efficient policy measures. Our objective is to identify the main determinants of households energy consumption. The model incorporates a discrete/continuous decision framework, which allows for interactions between decisions on the heating system (the discrete choice) and decisions on the consumption of energy (the continuous choice). We have three main contributions.First, we explore the role of households' socio-economic characteristics vs. technical properties of dwelling in explaining energy consumption. Second, we identify some of the main sources of energy conservation in the housing sector. Third, we estimate price-elasticity and income-elasticity in the French housing sector at a micro-level.Results show that the intensity of energy used per m² is almost completely determined by the technical properties of the dwelling and by the climate. The role of sociodemographic variables is particularly weak. This means that the challenge to environmental policies is to encourage households to undertake renovations.

:The behavior of Bangladeshi trade unions is characterized by political activism, and momentous strikes, called hartals there, have played a crucial part in most political changes in this country. We offer a theoretical framework for discussing this fact, and we test empirically its main prediction by bringing out the political cycle that characterizes the occurrence of strikes in Bangladesh.Acknowledgements : This paper owes much to many people met in Bangladesh during our numerous visits there, whom we wish to thank collectively. We thank also Francesco Goletti for providing some of the data used, without implicating. Helpful comments by an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged, without implicating.

This article uses data from the Bangladesh Labor Force Survey 2000 to analyze the magnitude, nature and determinants of child labor in Bangladesh. The magnitude of the ‘child labor’ problem is large in Bangladesh, with around 5.4–7.9 million, or about one-fifth of all Bangladeshi children between the ages of 5 and 14 years, being classified as child workers in 2000. Most of these child workers work in the agricultural sector. Among the poorest quintile of households, the share of family income contributed by child workers reaches nearly 50 percent. The article finds support for the widely-held hypothesis that poverty compels children to work. The analysis of links between adult employment and child labor also lends support to the hypothesis that children are the last economic resource of the household. Children are much more likely to work when they live in a household where the potential of income generation is low and where this potential has already been used up.