Child labor : a review

On September 30, 1990, the first World Summit for Children promised to reduce child mortality and malnutrition. It set targets to be reached by the year 2000. Although it established no explicit goals on child labor, the targets included basic education for all children and the completion of primary education by at least 80 percent of children. Meeting these goals will reduce child labor, say the authors. The evidence they review shows that education intervention play a key role in reducing child labor and should play a key role in its eventual abolition. But other interventions are also needed, including legislative action, appropriate labor market policies, fertility interventions, the adoption of technology, and better job opportunities for parents. There must also be advocates for better conditions for working children and for the empowerment of children and their families. An encouraging consensus is emerging - both in the literature and in the policies of international agencies concerned with child labor - that action, to be effective, must aim first to protect children and improve their living and working conditions. This implies a less stigmatized view of child labor, and the recognition that child labor itself can be used as a targeting device to help children through health, nutrition, schooling, and other interventions. In the long term, the objective of eliminating child labor must be approached through legislative action combined with social and economic incentives that take into account not only the types of child labor and child labor arrangements in a country but that country's institutional and administrative capacity.Children and Youth,Labor Policies,Street Children,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Street Children,Youth and Governance,Children and Youth,Environmental Economics&Policies

The lucky few amidst economic decline : distributional change in Cote d'Ivoire as seen through panel data sets, 1985-88

Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards? Did a lucky few escape the decline? Using panels of data from the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (for 1985-86, 1986-87, and 1987-88) allowed the authors to track the level of living for the same households over successive years. These panels had not yet been used to examine the dynamics of poverty in the second half of the 1980s. They find that two-period poverty was generally less than poverty measured from single-period snapshots. Surprisingly, a significant number of the poorest of the poor improve their status over the two years of the panel, even though there was a downturn in the average fortunes of the poor. The authors find that thelucky few are not so few. They were wide-spread regionally - though in some socioeconomic groupings, the poor had a greater chance to escape poverty amidst the general decline in living standards. Finer investigation of the characteristics of these groupings is hampered somewhat by the small sample sizes of the panels.Poverty Assessment,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers,Rural Poverty Reduction

The dynamics of welfare gains and losses: An African case study

This article uses panel survey data for Cote d'Ivoire to investigate the determinants of welfare gains and losses of households over time. A first-difference model is estimated which takes account of initial conditions. For urban areas, it was found that human capital is not only a key explanatory factor for levels of welfare, but also the most important endowment to explain welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital, especially land and farm equipment, mattered most. Household size and composition and socioeconomic characteristics of the household also affected welfare changes. Policy implications are discussed.

Causes of inequalities in China, 1952 to 1999

This paper presents a comprehensive picture of inequality in China on the basis of provincial data. It decomposes overall inequalities into intra and inter components. Rural-urban inequality dominated overall inequality in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Meanwhile, in recent years inter-regional inequality has grown rapidly and become an important component of inequality. We find that the pattern of inequality is quite different in the pre-reform and reform periods. Our results show that overall inequality in China is large by international standards and that it has grown worse during the past half century. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.