Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India's Child Labor Ban

Bharadwaj, Prashant; Lakdawala, Leah K.; Li, Nicholas

doi:10.3386/w19602

Cited by 31 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…These strategies will likely fail to eradicate child labor and improve living conditions for children (Budhwani, Wee, & McLean, 2004; Morrow, 2010) because a host of factors promotes or maintains child labor, including (but not limited to) the unavailability or prohibitive costs of quality schooling, gender-based cultural norms, the unavailability of alternative labor sources, and individual family needs. For example, there is some evidence that a national ban on child labor only serves to push children into lower-paying and less regulated jobs, which encourages parents to send children into labor more (Bharaswaj, Lakdawala, & Li, 2013; Edmonds, 2003). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is child labor a barrier to school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries?

Putnick

Bornstein

2015

International Journal of Educational Development

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Achieving universal primary education is one of the Millennium Development Goals. In low- and middle-income developing countries (LMIC), child labor may be a barrier. Few multi-country, controlled studies of the relations between different kinds of child labor and schooling are available. This study employs 186,795 families with 7- to 14-year-old children in 30 LMIC to explore relations of children’s work outside the home, family work, and household chores with school enrollment. Significant negative relations emerged between each form of child labor and school enrollment, but relations were more consistent for family work and household chores than work outside the home. All relations were moderated by country and sometimes by gender. These differentiated findings have nuanced policy implications.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is child labor a barrier to school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries?

Putnick

Bornstein

2015

International Journal of Educational Development

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“…He …nds that reaching the eligibility age makes a child more likely to work but not so much because it also simultaneously reduces his siblings' probability of work. These spillovers within families are also emphasized in Bharadwaj et al (2013), who study the introduction of minimum working age legislation in modern India. Using employment surveys conducted before and after the 1986 law, and age restrictions that determined whom the ban applied to, they show that the relative probability of child employment actually increased.…”

Section: Mininum Age Regulation In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In what follows, we shall use a variable drawn from Almeida and Carneiro (2009), namely the proportion of inspectors per …rm in a given municipality. 8 Second, there may be heterogeneity in compliance across di¤erent types of child activities. In principle, the Brazilian Constitution does not specify that the minimum age regulation should apply to a particular type of sector or activity.…”

Section: Institutional Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimum Age Regulation and Child Labor: New Evidence from Brazil

Bargain

Boutin²

2019

The World Bank Economic Review

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This study presents new evidence on the effects of minimum age regulations obtained from a natural experiment. In 1998, a constitutional reform in Brazil changed the minimum working age from 14 to 16. The reform was the legislative counterpart of a broad set of measures taken by a government strongly committed to eliminating child labor. This article investigates the role of the minimum working age in this context. The setting allows for improvements upon past approaches based on comparing employment rates of children at different ages. A discontinuity in treatment is exploited, namely the fact that only children who turned 14 after the enactment date (mid-December 1998) are banned from work. According to regression discontinuity and difference-in-discontinuity designs, the null hypothesis of no overall effect of the ban cannot be rejected. Throughout the methods and specifications, an employment effect in a confidence interval of $[-0.06, \, 0.03]$ (in percentage points) is found. A detailed heterogeneity analysis is performed and provides suggestive evidence of diminishing child labor trends in regions characterized by higher labor inspection intensity, which is interpreted as a trace of there being a law. However, contrary to what has been claimed in recent studies, the law seems not to have produced sizeable effects overall, at least in the short run. Power calculations and extensive sensitivity checks support these conclusions.

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“…Further, some evidence points out that child labor legislation has had the opposite effect. Bharadwaj and colleagues () argue that as a result of India's Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act (1986), children's wages decreased, causing poor households to utilize even more child labor. According to this study's findings, new regulation could thus affect 49% of child laborers who are receiving wages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consuming Childhoods: An Assessment of Child Labor's Role in Indian Production and Global Consumption

Gómez-Paredes¹,

Alsamawi²,

Yamasue³

et al. 2016

J of Industrial Ecology

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Summary Although evidence indicates the significant incidence of child labor in India, the role it plays in the economy is still considerably unknown. This study used disaggregated labor data and evaluated local and global supply chains to develop the first comprehensive and systematic assessment of Indian child labor involved in the production of commodities consumed worldwide, considering trade between more than 15,000 industrial sectors across 189 countries. Five questions were addressed: Which children are in child labor?; What is being produced with that labor?; Who are the final consumers?; What amount of financial resources would be needed to support these children?; and What would be the increase in labor production costs if adults were to replace children? It was found that of 9,687,688 children in child labor during July 2011 to June 2012, 95% of cases were linked to the production of just 35 commodities. Whereas most of these commodities were locally consumed, as many as 980,084 children (around 10%) worked for exports, more than what is typically assumed. Exports mainly consisted of agricultural and food products, clothing, minerals, and construction materials and were predominantly destined to 26 countries, the United States ranking first. Nonetheless, this study supports the notion that the simple removal of foreign demand will not solve the problem; it is poverty that needs to be addressed. Supporting children with allowances equal to their earnings would require 935 billion Indian Rupees, within a 13‐year period. If adult workers were to replace children, total production costs may increase only by around 1%.

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Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India's Child Labor Ban

Cited by 31 publications

References 52 publications

Is child labor a barrier to school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries?

Is child labor a barrier to school enrollment in low- and middle-income countries?

Minimum Age Regulation and Child Labor: New Evidence from Brazil

Consuming Childhoods: An Assessment of Child Labor's Role in Indian Production and Global Consumption

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