Essay About Child Labour And Work Activities

Child Labour Increase
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Globalisation, the process by which an increasing share of world production is traded
internationally, and the productive systems of different countries become increasingly
integrated, is credited with many merits and held responsible for many evils. The
present paper attempts to answer the following question: given that international trade
has major allocative and distributive implications, are children likely to be among the
losers? More specifically, given that child labour appears to be on the increase
worldwide, could this be a consequence of globalisation?
The current wave of globalisation started soon after the end of the second
world war, but got in its stride in the 1980s, as rapid progress in information and
transport technology compounded the effects of trade liberalisation (Krugman, 1995).
To try and understand the consequences of globalisation it thus seems reasonable to
look at what has happened over the last couple of decades. Much of the existing
literature on the subject is concerned with the consequences of globalisation for wages
and employment in the developed world (Wood, 1998). Since our concern is child
labour, and child labour is concentrated mainly in the developing world,2 we shall
focus on developing countries.
A useful source of cross-country information on child labour and international
trade are the World Banks Development Indicators. Another valuable source of
information on trade openness is Sachs and Warner (1995), which classifies a country
as “open” if free from a number of obstacles to trade, from non-tariff barriers to state
monopoly on major exports. Combining these two sources of information, we
assembled a set of relevant data on all developing countries for the relevant years
available, namely 1980, 1990, 1995 and 1998.
The measure of child labour that figures in the Development Indicators is the
participation rate of persons aged 10 to 14. That is an important indicator of early
involvement in work activities, but presents two lacunae. The first is that, by
excluding children younger than 10, it leaves out a large, arguably the most
worrisome, part of the phenomenon in question. A substantial number of children in
that age group is working either part or full time. According to the 1999 National
2 Though not on a comparable scale, child labour is becoming a problem also in developed countries.
There, however, it is largely connected with clandestine immigration. One way or another, the main
source of child workers is thus the developing world.
Council of Applied Economic Research survey of rural Indian households, for
example, around 10 percent of children aged 6 to 10 were reported by their parents as
working in one way or another.3 The second lacuna is that this measure of child
labour does not include children working within the household, and does not account
for children engaged in unofficial, especially if illegal, work activities. We know from
other sources, however, that children are extensively engaged in domestic activities,
and that many children reportedly doing nothing could be actually working. For
example, in the already mentioned Indian survey, the place where children are most
commonly reported to be working is the household. In the same survey, as much as a
quarter of children between the ages of 6 and 14 is reported as neither working nor
attending school, but there are reasons to suspect that a sizeable proportion of them
works (Cigno and Rosati, 2002).
As an alternative to this measure of child labour, we shall use also the primary
school non-attendance rate (the complement to unity of the primary school net
enrolment rate reported in the Development Indicators). The shortcoming of this
alternative measure is that a child not attending school is not necessarily working. On
the other hand, however, children not reporting for school are more difficult to
monitor, and thus more at risk of exposure to the worst forms of abuse – from
hazardous or very hard work, to soldiering and prostitution – than children regularly
available for inspection by the school authorities (Cigno, Rosati and Tzannatos,
2002). Therefore, the non-attendance rate is not only a correlate of child labour at
very young ages, but also a valuable danger signal. The 10-14 labour participation
rate and the primary school non-attendance rate are positively correlated with each
other across countries and years of observation, but the coefficient of correlation is
much less than unity.
3 Detailed information for about 40 countries can be found at www.ucw-project.org.
Figure 1.Correlation between Child Labour and Trade
Figures 1 and 2 show that both measures of child labour are negatively