Is There a Child Labor Trap? Intergenerational Persistence of Child Labor in Brazil

Abstract

This paper examines inter-generational persistence in child labor by developing a dynamic model and exploring its implications empirically in Brazil. We begin by building a simple overlapping generations model of the household child labor decision. We assume that this decision is made by the head of the household, where parents decide to send their child to work only if by doing so the child's contribution to the present consumption of the family outweighs the future consumption benefit the family would enjoy from keeping the child in school. The main predictions of the model are that children are more likely to work when they come from households with parents who were child laborers, from households with parents who have lower educational attainment and that child labor has adverse effects on children's educational attainment and their adult earnings. Evidence of persistence in child labor is found by examining household survey data from Brazil. We exploit the fact that the survey data includes information on child labor of both parents and children in a household, as well as information on the educational achievement of the grandparents. We find that children are more likely to be child laborers the younger their parents were when they entered the labor force and the lower the educational attainment of the parents and of the grandparents. Another important finding is that individuals who start work at a younger age tend to end up with lower earnings as adults suggesting that the vocational training aspect of child labor does not the negative effect from loss of schooling.

Is Child Labor Harmful? The Impact of Working Earlier in Life on Adult Earnings

“…4 A number of previous studies address the consequences of child labor -three of which deserve special mention. In Emerson and Souza (2003), we included an estimate of the impact of child labor on adult earnings in Brazil in a paper that was primarily concerned with the intergenerational transmission of child labor. In that paper we found results that are similar to the OLS results in the current study, but we were unable to control for potentially endogenous variables, however, and the results were, therefore, only suggestive.…”

Child labour implications for adults: experiences and childhood

“…Given such reflection on the family background of lack of schooling, Vera comes again upon her own personal situation of lacking education, what is repeated throughout her own history. This is corroborated by authors like Emerson and Souza (2002) and Tabatabai (2007) who identify an intergenerational reproduction of the child labour as one of its possible implications. In the second flow of her discourse, Vera identifies that child labour resulted in difficulty to study and brought about other implications for her current life: shame not to know how to sign her name and the discriminatory glance of other people because of that; impossibility of leaving home by herself; not to know how to read and write, therefore having limited her autonomy possibilities and becoming dependent on her daughters in relation to that.…”

“…They conclude that the effect of the child labour on income is reduced among those who started labour later, between 12 and 14 years. Emerson and Souza (2002), similarly to Kassouf (2000), identify a negative impact of child labour on income when early labourers become adults, especially coupled with low education. They conclude that the loss of income when children are early directed toward labour is more significant than the gains in income that one could have and the experience acquired in the early labour.…”

“…Accordingly, the early labour is a factor that brings implications for those who execute it, and relates to other long-lasting repercussions such as lack of qualification to the work and perpetuation of poverty (Emerson & Souza, 2002;Kassouf, 2007;Tabatabai, 2007). Sampaio and Ruiz (1996) 1 identified damages of child labour upon psyche as regards the state of animus, where the lack of succession between positive and negative experiences would provoke the creation of a pessimist and uncritical adult.…”

“…Although the intergenerational transmission of child labour is also set as one of the causes of early labour, Emerson and Souza (2002) recognize that this transmission is also one of the consequences of early labour, since parents who were early put into labour tend to do so more easily with their children as well. Kassouf (2000) still ascertains that child labour also affects adults health, even when are provided scholarity, household infrastructure, sanitation, among others.…”