The Economics of Child Labour: Education, Fertility, and Infant Mortality in Developing Countries

Children throughout the world are engaged in a variety of activities classifiable as work. These range from relatively harmless, even laudable, activities like helping parents in the home, to morally or physically dangerous ones. Many forms of child labour have valuable learning-by-doing elements, but they all conflict with formal education. If the family is credit constrained, child labour relaxes the liquidity constraint and may be necessary to avoid starvation. Statistically and theoreti...