poverty and child farm labour in Africa: Wealth paradox or bad orthodox

Abstract

The link between poverty and child labor has traditionally been regarded as well established but recent researches have questioned its validity, suggesting that child labor is more important in the richest households (wealth paradox). The present study revisits the link between poverty and farm child labor in Africa and aims at testing the paradoxical wealth effect. Using different modeling techniques, the analysis focuses on family-controlled child labor taking place in the cocoa sector of Côte d'Ivoire. The results reveal that the effect of different commonly used wealth proxies have opposite effects on child labor participation and are sometimes sensitive to the modeling technique. This mixed result is the root of the apparent wealth paradox found in the literature. However, relevant and robust wealth proxies clearly indicate a positive relationship between poverty and child labor. The study therefore sustains that the apparent wealth paradox found in the literature is the end result of a bad orthodoxy.

Effect of cropland and livestock ownership on child labour in eastern Ethiopia: empirical examination of the Wealth Paradox

“…Households with larger cropland perform better in terms of the welfare indicators. Nkamleu (2006) has got similar findings about interaction of child labour for work and household's productive cocoa land in Côte d'Ivoire. Bhalotra and Heady (2003) describes the counter-intuitive situation, where children in land-rich households are more likely to work and less likely to attend school than children from land poor households.…”

Gender-based violence and gender bias in schooling decision: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

“…In terms of other indicators of empowerment, the mothers' land ownership negatively affects the schooling of girls in Comoros and Mali, and boys in Uganda. These results refer to the wealth paradox, which emphasizes the paradoxical observation that children in land-rich households are more likely to work and less likely to attend school than children in land-poor households (Basu and Tzannatos 2003;Bhalotra and Heady 2003;Rajan 2005, 2006;Nkamleu 2006;Basu et al 2010;Koissy-Kpein 2012b, 2012c).…”

Land endowment and education investment behavior of rural households: a field survey based on 887 administrative villages in 31 provinces of China

“…The authors attribute such effect to the fact that landowners need agricultural labor for farming, but do not use the land for investment to obtain financial income. 1 Nkamleu (2006) analyzes data from 1501 households in Cote d'Ivoire and finds that the higher the marginal returns of children engaging in agricultural work, the lower the school enrollment rate. Rosenzweig (1977) proposes an opportunity cost hypothesis to explain the substitution effect of land on education and argues that increases in land rent payments would increase the opportunity cost from education investment and thereby would reduce school enrollment rate.…”