Family size,schooling and child labor in Peru -- an empirical analysis

This paper analyzes the effects of being indigenous, number of siblings, sibling activities and sibling age structure on child schooling progress and child non-school activity. The analysis is based on the Peru 1991 Living Standards Survey. The analysis shows that family size is important. However, the analysis also demonstrates the importance of taking into consideration the activities of siblings. The number of siblings not entrolled in school proves to be an important control variable in at least one specification of the empirical model. However, more research is needed on the interactions between siblings, their activities and their age structure. In other words, an attempt must be made to find ways of taking into account the “life cycle effects” of one‘s siblings on their schooling performance and labor force activity. The analysis also shows that the age structure of siblings is important, but in conjunction with their activities. That is, having a greater number of younger siblings implies less schooling, more age-grade distortion in the classroom and more child labor. JEL classification: J22, J23, I21 Received August 1, 1996 / Accepted February 21, 1997     

Consumer boycott, household heterogeneity, and child labor

Consumer boycott campaigns against goods that are produced using child labor are becoming increasingly popular. Yet there is still no consensus on which are the effects of such type of activism on child labor in developing countries. In fact, if some agreement is to be found in the recent economic literature, it is that the boycott does not reduce child labor. We contribute to this discussion presenting a simple model which shows that there are conditions under which a consumer boycott reduces child labor. We consider a small country two-factor economy populated by heterogeneous households. The boycott affects both the adult and the child labor markets. We show that the effects are heterogeneous and depend on household characteristics and on the income distribution. We derive the conditions under which the consumer boycott reduces child labor not only for nonpoor households but also for some of the households whose’ income is—before the boycott—under the subsistence level.     

Understanding sibling differences in child labor

This study considers sibling differences in child labor in Nepal. The data are consistent with a model where parents care equally for all children but siblings differ in comparative advantage in household production, although parental preferences and credit constraints could also be important. Girls, especially older girls, tend to work more than their brothers. This extra work increases with the number of younger siblings and the spacing between siblings. The extra work performed by girls is such that, at modal birth spacing, the younger girl actually spends significantly more time working than her older brother.

Differentials in infant and child mortality and their change over time: Guatemala, 1959–1973

This paper employs 5 percent samples of the Guatemalan censuses of 1964 and 1973 to estimate differential childhood mortality. For 1973, conventional indirect mortality estimation procedures were applied; for 1964, a modification of the Preston-Palloni technique was used. A major result is that differential child mortality widened appreciably between about 1959 and about 1968. Factors leading to mortality decline were possibly unequally spread by geographic region, rural-urban residence, ethnic groups, and educational groups. Guatemala City seems to have benefited most from the decline. Analysis of small geographic units supports these conclusions and suggests some role for public health. A by-product of the analysis was the finding that parity was understated in the 1964 census.     

The influence of market wages and parental history on child labour and schooling in Egypt

This paper examines the influence of adult market wages and having parents who were child labourers on child labour, when this decision is jointly determined with child schooling, using data from Egypt. The empirical results suggest that low adult market wages are key determinants of child labour; a 10% increase in the illiterate male market wage decreases the probability of child labour by 22% for boys and 13% for girls. The findings also indicate the importance of social norms in the intergenerational persistence of child labour: parents who were child labourers themselves are on average 10% more likely to send their children to work. In addition, higher local regional income inequality increases the likelihood of child labour.

Household vulnerability and child labor: the effect of shocks,credit rationing,and insurance

In this paper, we use a unique data set for Guatemala to estimate the effect of idiosyncratic shocks and credit constrains on children’s labor supply and schooling decisions. We extend Rosenbaum and Rubin (J R Stat Soc B 45:212–218, 1983b) analysis to the case of a multinomial outcome by proposing an innovative sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of the estimates with respect to the presence of unobservables. The results show that credit rationing is an important determinant of school enrollment and children’s work. Exposure to negative shocks also strongly influences household decisions and pushes children to work, while access to coping mechanisms, like insurance, tends to increase education and to reduce child labor.     

Role of women in schooling and child labour decision: the case of urban boys in India

This paper uses household level data from National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of India, the 55th round (1999–2000), to show that for urban male children there exists significant wage incentive for schooling, though school dropout rate and child labour incidence are not so small. The parents’ level of education plays an important role in reducing this tendency; thus establishing the linkage between social and human capital outcomes in the family. We also look at the incidence of harmful and manual occupations among the child labour. Mother’s education now appears as a very important factor in curbing these incidences; supporting earlier findings that women’s empowerment (one important indicator of which would be female educational level) is indeed instrumental in increasing parental awareness.     

The labor force implications of expanding the child care industry

This paper examines the labor force implications of increased social investment in the child care industry. We have two main conclusions to report. First, expanding the child care industry will remove a major barrier to employment for a sizable number of women. This includes women in middle and upper income families who desire to work for personal fulfillment and to improve their families' lifestyles. But even more so, it includes women in low-income and single-parent families who need to work to maintain a minimal and dignified standard of living and who might otherwise remain dependent on welfare benefits for their own and their families' subsistence. Second, expanding the child care industry will help employers cope with a range of personnel problems they will increasingly face as the U.S. undergoes a major transition in the 1990's from being a labor surplus economy to being a labor shortage economy.     

Fertility and economic activity of women in Guatemala city, 1964

Data from a five percent census sample reveal that in Guatemala City in 1964 economically active women, especially domestic servants, had lower cumulative fertility than inactive women, partly because larger proportions of them had never married and were childless. However, even among ever married mothers there was a substantial differential, which was not due to differences in age at first birth. With respect to all women, cross tabulation and regression analysis show that age, marital status and educational attainment were more strongly associated with fertility than was activity status, but the latter also had a significant net association. Selection for sterility was not likely. Being contrary to expectations expressed in the literature, the very low fertility of the domestics received further attention. Live-in domestics had considerably lower fertility than those who lived out, which was also the case in the United States in 1960. These data and other evidence strongly suggest that this differential is due to a widespread employer preference for single or childless women. The concept of role incompatibility is therefore inapplicable to domestic servants. These findings add to the considerable evidence showing lower fertility among economically active women in large urban places in Latin America.     

Disaster vulnerability,displacement, and infectious disease: Nicaragua and Hurricane Mitch

Population and Environment - Research conducted among socially vulnerable populations caught in the paths of natural disasters represents the forefront of our understanding the health-related...     

Cohort size and schooling choice

We develop a perfect-foresight overlapping generations model to investigate the effects of cohort size on schooling decisions and cohort-specific welfare measures. A set of sufficient conditions are presented which ensure the existence of an unique sequence of human capital rental rates and schooling choices for any sequence of cohort sizes. We calibrate the partial equilibrium model using data on schooling investments and aggregate wages over the period 1920 through 1980, and use the parameters to assess the magnitude of lifetime cohort wealth and schooling elasticities computed with respect to the entire cohort size sequence. We find that the equilibrium response of schooling to perturbations in the cohort size sequence is small, so that the adverse effects of increases in the size of own and neighboring cohorts on cohort wealth are not significantly migrated by adjustments in schooling investments within our modelling framework.This research was partially supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01-HD28409 and by the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. Comments and suggestions by three anonymous referees have resulted in a substantially improved paper. Francis Gupta provided extremely able research assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are attributable to me.     

Rural-Urban Migration and Reproductive Behavior in Guatemala

Guatemala has the highest fertility of any country in Latin America, and it is also the least urbanized. Projected rural-urban migration will shift more of Guatemala's population from rural areas into towns and cities. This article uses retrospective life-history data collected in migrant origin and destination areas in Guatemala to compare the fertility of rural-urban migrant women to that of rural and urban nonmigrants. Results from discrete-time hazard regression models of union formation, first birth, and third and higher parity births indicate that delayed marriage while still in rural areas, and the rapid adoption of urban fertility practices after migration, result in intermediate migrant fertility that is closer to that of urban natives than rural nonmigrants. If current patterns are any guide to the future, the redistribution of population from high fertility rural areas to towns and cities in Guatemala will accelerate the decline in aggregate fertility beyond what would have resulted from declines in rural and urban fertility alone.     

The size and structure of residential families, Guatemala City, 1964

Abstract In a review of census data for the periods 1945-54 and 1955-63, Burch discloses an increasing tendency for average household sizes to cluster at five to six members for developing nations, compared to three to four for developed nations.(1) Also, among developing nations he finds less than 50% of the population living in households containing three to six persons. This apparently contradicts Levy's general rule which prompted his study, that 'for well over 50% of the members of ... all known societies in world history' actual family size and composition have varied much less than would be expected, given ideal rules of residence which can vary from the classical extended family of Asian renown and European history to the small 'isolated' nuclear family of the modernized West.(2).     

Body Size,Skills, and Income: Evidence From 150,000 Teenage Siblings

We provide new evidence on the long-run labor market penalty of teenage overweight and obesity using unique and large-scale data on 150,000 male siblings from the Swedish military enlistment. Our empirical analysis provides four important results. First, we provide the first evidence of a large adult male labor market penalty for being overweight or obese as a teenager. Second, we replicate this result using data from the United States and the United Kingdom. Third, we note a strikingly strong within-family relationship between body size and cognitive skills/noncognitive skills. Fourth, a large part of the estimated body-size penalty reflects lower skill acquisition among overweight and obese teenagers. Taken together, these results reinforce the importance of policy combating early-life obesity in order to reduce healthcare expenditures as well as poverty and inequalities later in life.     

Local labor markets,children and labor force participation of wives

Most research on married women’s labor force participation relates characteristics of individual women to their probability of labor force participation. Some studies relate characteristics of geographic areas to average labor force participation rates in those areas, although these aggregate level analyses are usually gross tests of ideas about individuallevel processes. Here we take a quintessentially sociological perspective and seek to understand how characteristics of geographic areas structure the relationship between properties of individual women and their probabilities oflabor force participation. Our analysis has two steps. In step one, we fit individual-level probit models of married women’s probability of labor force participation. A separate model is fitted in each of 409 areas using 1970 Census data, and the relationship between individual characteristics and labor force participation is found to vary substantially across areas. In step two, we attempt to explain areal variation in the effects of women’s children on their labor force participation. We hypothesize that the effect of children on their mothers’ labor force participation is a function ofthe cost and availability of childcare, and of the “convenience” of jobs for working mothers in the places where the mothers live. Measures of childcare cost, childcare availability and job convenience are developed. Weighted least squares analyses of probit coefficients from the first stage are, in general, very consistent with our findings, and suggest that the approach taken in this paper is likely to be a fruitful one for future studies.     

The effects of status on women’s autonomy in Bolivia,Peru,and Nicaragua

A recent ideological revolution promoting women’s status has raised questions concerning determinants of autonomy and their implications for policy formation. This study seeks to identify objective indicators determinant of autonomy, and then examine their relationship in light of women’s subjective experiences of autonomy. Potential determinants include education, literacy, household size, age at marriage, employment, and socioeconomic status. Analyses are based on these data sets: the 2000 Bolivia Family Interaction and Children’s Well-Being (FICW) Survey, the 2000 Peru Demographic Health Survey and the 1997/1998 Nicaraguan Demographic and Health Survey. Our findings indicate that autonomy is multidimensional. Utilizing Structural equation modeling, we identify two major domains autonomy: decision-making autonomy and personal autonomy in Bolivia, and family autonomy and public autonomy in Nicaragua and Peru. This study shows that each of our specified determinants has some influence on autonomy, with education and socioeconomic status being the most important. We conclude that policies designed to change educational, economic, and familial characteristics of women will only have a modest impact on women’s overall sense of autonomy.     

The perceived impact of child care costs on women’s labor supply and fertility

In a sample of Detroit-area mothers of preschool-aged children interviewed in 1986, one-third reported that child care problems had constrained their employment. Such reports were relatively prevalent among poor women, those without relatives nearby, and those willing to entrust the care of their children to nonfamily members. Only one-tenth of the sample reported a similar child care constraint on fertility, a phenomenon unrelated to income but relatively prevalent among women with strong labor force attachment. The results suggest that policies to increase the supply of child care or to lower its cost could increase female labor supply by a substantial fraction, with an even greater rise among women most at risk of poverty and reliance on public assistance, but probably would not raise fertility significantly.     

Orphans and schooling in africa: a longitudinal analysis

AIDS deaths could have a major impact on economic development by affecting the human capital accumulation of the next generation. We estimate the impact of parent death on primary school participation using an unusual five-year panel data set of over 20,000 Kenyan children. There is a substantial decrease in school participation following a parent death and a smaller drop before the death (presumably due to pre-death morbidity). Estimated impacts are smaller in specifications without individual fixed effects, suggesting that estimates based on cross-sectional data are biased toward zero. Effects are largest for children whose mothers died and, in a novel finding, for those with low baseline academic performance.     

Revision of Ladino and Maya census populations of Guatemala, 1950 and 1964

This article examines the Guatemalan census enumeration for 1950 and 1964 and the vital registration from 1945 to 1969. The examination reveals an inconsistency in the ethnic reporting of Ladino and Maya between the two systems. The evidence indicates census misclassification of the Maya population. An adjustment procedure is presented to revise the Ladino and Mayan populations for the two census years.