This paper is motivated by the remarkable observation that children in land-rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land-poor households. The vast majority of working children in developing countries are in agricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by their families. Land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies and it is typically distributed very unequally. These facts challenge the common presumption that child labour emerges from the poorest households. This article suggests that this seeming paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labour and land. Credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox. These effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. The main result is that the "wealth paradox" persists for girls in both countries whereas, for boys, it disappears after conditioning on other covariates.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Fatal Fluctuations? Cyclicality in Infant Mortality in IndiaSonia Bhalotra D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACT Fatal Fluctuations? Cyclicality in Infant Mortality in India *This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature shows that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical but similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries. This paper uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150000 children born in 1970-1997, merged by birth-cohort with a state panel containing information on aggregate income. Identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother, conditional upon a number of state-time varying covariates including rainshocks. I cannot reject the null that income shocks have no effect on mortality in urban households, but I find that rural infant mortality is counter-cyclical, the elasticity being about -0.46. This is despite the possibility that relatively high risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions. It seems related to the fact that women's participation in the (informal) labour market increases in recessions, presumably, to compensate a decline in their husband's wages. Consistent with this but, in contrast to results for richer countries, antenatal and postnatal health-care decline in recessions. These effects are reinforced by pro-cyclicality in state health and development expenditure. Another interesting finding that is informative about the underlying mechanisms is that the effect of aggregate income on rural mortality is driven by non-agricultural income.JEL Classification: I12, J10, O49

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A dynamic panel data model of neonatal mortality and birth spacing is analyzed, accounting for causal effects of birth spacing on subsequent mortality and of mortality on the length of the next birth interval, while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in mortality (frailty) and birth spacing (fecundity). The model is estimated using micro data on almost 30,000 children of 7,300 Indian mothers, for whom a complete retrospective record of fertility and child mortality is available. Information on sterilization is used to identify an equation for completion of family formation that is needed to account for rightcensoring in the data. We find clear evidence of frailty, fecundity, and causal effects of birth spacing on mortality and vice versa, but find that birth interval effects can explain only a limited share of the correlation between neonatal mortality of successive children in a family. We also predict the impact of mortality on total fertility. Model simulations suggest that, for every neonatal death, an additional 0.37 children are born, of whom 0.3 survive.

Expectations are high, but evidence of the impact of microcredit remains in short supply. This article estimates the impact of an urban credit programme in Zambia on business performance and on a range of indicators of wellbeing. Borrowers who obtained a second loan experienced significantly higher average growth in business profits and household income. Inflexible group enforcement of loan obligations resulted in some borrowers, especially amongst those who had taken only one loan, being made worse off. Our methodological investigations suggest that the supply of rigorous impact studies can be increased by basing them on data collection that serves a wider range of purposes, including market research.Microcredit, Urban Credit Programme, Household Incomes, Business Profits, Zambia,