Schooling Costs and Child Work in Rural Pakistan

A conventional argument in the child–labour debate is that improvements in access to schools are an effective way to reduce the labour force participation of children. It is argued that schooling competes with economic activity in the use of children's time, and enhanced access to schools, interpretable as reduction in schooling costs, may raise school attendance at the expense of child labour. In this article, we draw a distinction between child labour within the household (intra-household) and child work in the labour market (extra-household), and examine the separate effects of schooling costs upon these two types of child labour in rural Pakistan. Consistent, at least in part, with our theoretical framework, we find that extra-household child labour and schooling costs are positively related whereas intra-household child labour is insensitive to changes in the costs of schooling. Our results suggest that reduction in schooling costs will have limited success in the abatement of child labour in rural Pakistan.     

The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrolment and Labour: Evidence from Pakistan

Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how food price increases in Pakistan in 2008–2010 affect children’s school enrolment and labour. The causal identification relies on the geographical variations in food (wheat) price. The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrolment differ by gender, economic status and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labour because the transition from being idle to labour activity or from school to being idle is significant, particularly among poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural lands are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on child education.     

Crises,What Crises? New Evidence on the Relative Roles of Political and Economic Crises in Begetting Reforms

Crises beget reforms is a powerful hypothesis. But which type of crises – economic or political – are the main drivers of structural reforms? To answer this question, we construct measures of labour market and trade liberalisation and the two types of crises for a panel of about 100 developed and developing countries between 1960 and 2000. We find that political crises are more important determinants of structural reforms than economic crises. This finding is robust to the inclusion of interdependencies between crises, feedbacks between reforms, different estimators and various alternative measures of crises.     

A Little Help May Be No Help at All: Size of Scholarships and Child Labour in Nepal

In the empirical literature on child labour and income transfer programmes, evidence has been lacking on whether (and how) the size of transfer influences the impact on child labour. This paper finds significant size effects in the impact of scholarship-based transfers on child labour in Nepal. High-value scholarships decrease 8–16 year-old girls’ total work hours by one-third, largely reducing their hours in paid and unpaid economic activities with little impact on domestic chores. Low-value scholarships have no impact at all. The findings elucidate the scope for calibrating transfer size to achieve greater child labour impacts in developing countries.     

On the Short- and Medium-Term Effects of Formalisation: Panel Evidence from Vietnam

This paper analyses the consequences of formalisation on the performance of informal firms, using a panel dataset from Vietnam. We find that switching firms (before switching) have higher profit and value added compared to non-switching firms; suggesting heterogeneity. Becoming formal leads to an additional increase in switching firms’ profit and value added. The benefits of formalisation materialise in the short-term (one year) and persist in the longer-term (three or more years). These benefits run through various channels such as better access to powered equipment or higher business association membership; but not better access to credit.     

Risk,Credit Constraints and Financial Efficiency in Peruvian Agriculture

Based on a panel data set, we use a two-stage analysis to evaluate the effects of access to formal credit on financial efficiency of farms in northern Peru. The first stage uses non-parametric data envelope analysis to estimate farm-specific measures of financial efficiency; 28 per cent of farmers are financially inefficient and credit constraints reduce profits of these farmers by an average of between 17 and 27 per cent. The second stage uses Tobit regression to evaluate the determinants of financial inefficiency; the results point to uninsured risk as a key determinant of financial inefficiency and suggest that policies to strengthen agricultural insurance markets would likely pay large dividends in rural Peru.     

Legal Environment,Finance Channels and Investment: The East African Example

How do legal environments and finance affect investments by firms in the East African community? Property rights, external and internal finance channels – key conduits of the transmission mechanism from ‘legal environment’ to ‘investment’– individually and interactively affect firms' decision to invest. Firms that perceive secure property rights are more likely to invest in fixed capital. The interactions suggest governments in this community would do well to pursue investment/growth policies that slant heavily towards financial markets deepening while not ignoring enhancement of legal infrastructures. Overall, property rights, external finance, internal finance, firm size, and an export-orientation, are important determinants of the investment decision.     

International migration,remittances and development: myths and facts

The debate on international South – North labour migration tends to focus on the receiving end of migration. This bias obscures a proper understanding of the developmental causes and consequences of migration at the sending end. The reciprocal migration – development relationship is examined through the discussion of seven migration ‘myths’. Because of its profound developmental roots, it is useless to think that migration can be halted or that aid and trade are short-cut ‘solutions’ to immigration. Migrant remittances contribute significantly to development and living conditions in sending countries. Nevertheless, the recent ‘remittance euphoria’ is not justified, because unattractive investment environments and restrictive immigration policies which interrupt circular migration patterns prevent the high development potential of migration from being fully realised. Although specific policies can enhance this potential through facilitating remittance transfers and investments, the key lies in encouraging circular migration. Instead of uselessly and harmfully trying to stop inevitable migration, immigration policies allowing for freer circulation can, besides increasing migration control, enhance the vital contribution of migrants to the development of their home countries.     

Regional Returns to Education,Child Labour and Schooling in India

We offer evidence from India that higher regional returns to primary education not only increase the likelihood that boys and girls attend school but also decrease the likelihood that they work. These relationships hold only for the top three quintiles of the income distribution and mostly for children in the age group 10–14 years. The former result suggests that liquidity constraints may not allow poorer households to respond to the economic benefits of education. Policies that raise the economic benefits of education may increase human capital investments in households that do not rely on their children's incomes for survival. However, low schooling and high child labour will persist among credit constrained families unless these households are provided with the economic ability to respond to these benefits.     

Expanding Microfinance in Brazil: Credit Utilisation and Performance of Small Firms

We take advantage of the natural experiment generated by the exogenous change in government policy towards microcredit to evaluate the impact of the increased supply of microcredit on the utilisation of credit by micro-entrepreneurs. Based on micro-entrepreneurs' survey and administrative data from a microcredit programme in Brazil, we show that: the increased supply of microcredit raised formal credit utilisation and this does not crowd out the use of informal credit sources; formal credit taking improves business performance; and returns are larger for women- than for men-owned firms, but males employ significantly more workers after taking formal credit than females.     

Girl Farm Labour and Double-shift Schooling in The Gambia: The Paradox of Development Intervention

This article examines the intensification of Gambian girls’ domestic and farm labour contributions as a result of the introduction of double-shift schooling. Drawing on fieldwork among female farmers and their daughters in Brikama the article puts forth the following arguments: doubleshift schooling facilitates the intensification and increased appropriation of surplus value from girls’ household and farm labour because girls are more readily able to meet gendered labour obligations that are central to the moral economy of the household and to the demands of agrarian production; secondly, double-shift schooling highlights the paradoxical nature of development intervention where, on the one hand, legislation and policy call for a reduction in child labour by increasing access to school and, on the other, neo-liberal educational policy serves to facilitate the intensification of girls’ domestic and farm labour. This paper maintains that the intensification of girls’ workmust be placed within a wider context where children’s — particularly girls — cheap, flexible and/or unremunerated labour is central to the functioning of local and global processes of accumulation.     

Does Health Insurance Reduce Child Labour and Education Gaps? Evidence from Rwanda

A common practice of poor households to informally deal with risk is to allocate children’s time away from school towards income-generating activities or household production. Focussing on Rwanda, this study investigates whether the provision of formal health insurance helps to prevent this undesired risk coping strategy. We find that children of households enrolled in health insurance work significantly less compared to those of not enrolled families, and also have better educational achievements. The results suggest that policy interventions which reduce household risk exposure may have additional benefits in terms of lower child labour supply and higher schooling levels.     

Decomposing the Labour Productivity Gap between Migrant-Owned and Native-Owned Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa

Migration studies have been primarily based on the movement of individuals from developing to developed economies, with a focus on the impact of migrants on host country wages. In this study we take a different angle by exploring the labour productivity of migrant-owned firms versus native-owned firms in 20 African economies using firm-level data. We find that labour productivity is 78 per cent higher in migrant-owned firms than native-owned firms. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method we find that structural effects account for 80 per cent of the labour productivity gap. Returns to manager education largely explain the productivity advantage of migrant-owned firms over native-owned firms. Interactions with the government, access to finance, informality, and power outages are also considerable contributors to the labour productivity gap.     

How Resilient are Labour Markets to Natural Disasters? The Case of the 1998 Bangladesh Flood

Natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation. The resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk. We evaluate how the 1998 ‘flood of the century’ affected wages in Bangladesh. We find short-term declines in agricultural and non-agricultural wages. Agricultural workers who moved towards non-agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short-term wages. Endowed with human capital, salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk. Extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood.     

The Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: The Role of Market Imperfections

This paper hypothesises that labour and credit market imperfections – by discouraging off-farm income-generating activities and restricting access to inputs, respectively – affect female farm productivity more deeply than male productivity. The paper develops a theoretical model, which decomposes the contribution of various market imperfections to the gender productivity gap. Empirically we show that agricultural labour productivity is, on average, 44 per cent lower on female-headed plots than on those managed by male heads. 34 per cent of this gap is explained by differences in labour market access and 29 per cent by differences in credit access.     

Common elements of efficiency wage theories: What relevance for developing countries?

Conventional labour economics argues that wages are determined by supply and demand and that the typical firm is a wage taker. Efficiency wage theories state that wages are endogenous to a firm's own optimising behaviour and that the wage rate determines the labour productivity. These theories raise questions regarding the effectiveness of expenditure‐reducing and expenditure‐switching adjustment policies. This article reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on efficiency wages. It examines alternative models, highlights the emphasis of empirical research towards industrial countries, and points out the need for a test based on the major implications of the theory.     

Volatility of Short-term Capital Flows and Private Investment in Emerging Markets

Using micro-level panel data, the paper analyses the impacts of short-term capital flow volatility on new fixed investment spending of publicly traded real sector firms in three major emerging markets – Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. The empirical results, including sensitivity tests, suggest that increasing volatility of capital inflows has an economically and statistically significant negative effect on new investment spending of private firms. Accordingly, a 10 per cent increase in capital flow volatility reduces fixed investment spending in the range of 1–1.7, 2.3–15, and 1 per cent in Argentina, Mexico and Turkey respectively.     

Egypt's multiproduct agricultural technology and agricultural policy

Based on the hypothesis that Egyptian farmers maximise economic profits, the multiproduct translog profit function is used to estimate input demand and output supply functions for corn, rice, and cotton crops grown in Egypt's Nile delta. Elasticity estimates indicate a generally high degree of price responsiveness. The estimates are used to evaluate Egyptian agricultural policies concerning labour, mechanisation, and output prices. The results show that Egypt's agricultural policies of taxing output and subsidising certain inputs have hada substantial negative impact on agricultural productivity.     

Minority entrepreneurs and firm performance in sub‐Saharan Africa

This study focuses on the role of entrepreneurs in the private sector in sub‐Saharan Africa. Using data from the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) and controlling for various factors, our analysis compares growth rates of indigenously owned African firms with firms owned by entrepreneurs of Asian or European descent, in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. We find that after controlling for firm size and age, various entrepreneurial characteristics, and sector and country differences, minority (or non‐indigenous) entrepreneur firms start out larger and grow significantly faster than indigenously‐owned African firms. Our results are consistent with theories that argue that informational and financial networks created by minority entrepreneurs provide access to credit, information, and technology for members of these networks. We also find that within indigenously‐owned African firms, entrepreneurs with secondary and/or university education realise a higher rate of growth; access to education presumably enables indigenous African entrepreneurs to develop managerial skills that serve as a substitute for the informational and financial networks created by minority entrepreneurs.     

A Vaccination for Education: Early Childhood Development Programme and the Education of Older Girls in Rural India

Girls lag behind boys in education in India and relatively more provide childcare at home. This paper investigates whether provision of childcare services by India’s largest child development programme narrows the gender education gap by reducing childcare costs. Using logit, village fixed effects and mother fixed effects, I find that girls 6–14 years old, whose younger sibling 0–5 years old is receiving any of the programme services intensely, are at least three percentage points more likely to be in school than similar boys. Further, I find that these girls are also more likely to complete early primary grades than boys.