Child labour and educational success in Portugal

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Abstract

The current debate on child labour focuses on developing countries. However, Portugal is an example of a relatively developed country where child labour is still a matter of concern as between 8% and 12% of Portuguese children may be classified as workers. This paper studies the patterns of child labour in Portugal and assesses the consequences of working on the educational success of Portuguese children. The analysis controls for typically unobserved attributes such as a child's interest in school and educational ambitions and uses geographical variation in policies designed to tackle child labour and in labour inspection regimes to instrument child labour. We find that economic work hinders educational success, while domestic work does not appear to be harmful. Furthermore, after controlling for a host of socio-economic variables, factors such as a child's interest in school and educational ambitions have a large effect on boosting educational success and reducing economic work.

Introduction

Historically, the development of countries has been associated with a long-run decline in child employment (see Cunningham & Viazzo, 1996). Accordingly, the current focus in the child labour debate is on conditions faced by children in developing countries, even though there are examples of relatively developed countries such as Portugal which still struggle with the issue of working children.

Since the early 1990s, child labour in Portugal has attracted considerable attention. For example, a 1992 report by Anti-Slavery International (Williams, 1992) estimated that there were 200,000 working children in Portugal. In part, as a consequence of the controversy generated by these numbers the Government conducted household surveys, in 1998 and 2001, to provide credible information on working children. These surveys revealed that about 8–12% of Portuguese children in the age group 6–15 were involved in some form of economic or domestic work (see Table 1).1 While this figure is lower than the 20–25% participation rate suggested by Williams (1992), it is higher than ILO (2002) estimates of the average work participation rates in developed (2%) and transition countries (4%).

The resilience of child labour despite overall economic progress and efforts to tackle the issue suggests that Portugal's economic and cultural characteristics still generate a favourable environment for child labour.2 Per se, a work incidence of 8–12 may not be a matter of concern. However, an issue of concern is, whether the work activities of Portuguese children hampers their educational performance? This paper assesses the factors that determine both these outcomes and examines whether the work activities of children has a causal impact on their educational success.3

The motivation for our work stems from the potential consequences of the early labour force entry of children on their educational success. For an individual, lower educational attainment translates into a life-long handicap, leading to a lower probability of employment and access to low-paying jobs. Beyond the individual, in an enlarged and increasingly competitive environment within the European Union (EU), the ability of Portugal to compete depends on a well-educated labour force. However, with functional literacy at 52% (OECD, 2000) and low levels of educational achievement Portugal continues to lag behind its EU counterparts (OECD, 2003).

There are several notable features of our study. First, for obvious reasons there is little work on developed countries. Examining this issue in the context of a relatively high-income country may provide guidance on useful policies for developing countries. Second, the bulk of the child work—educational outcome literature focuses on the correlation between these two outcomes.4 In our work, we attempt to identify the causal effect of child work on educational success. This is similar to the more recent literature on developing (Beegle, Dehejia, & Gatti, 2003; Boozer & Suri, 2001; Gunnarsson, Orazem, & Sanchez, 2003) and developed (Stinebrickner & Stinebrickner, 2003; Tyler, 2003) countries which uses an instrumental variables (IV) estimation strategy to identify the impact of child work. Third, in addition to the econometric strategy we have information on unusual educational related measures such as a child's interest in school and educational ambitions. Thus, we are able to control for typically unobserved attributes of children and use an IV strategy. Fourth, we draw a distinction between domestic and economic work and assess the influence of these two types of work on the educational success of children.

The following section provides a descriptive analysis of child labour and educational success. Section 3 lays out our analytical approach, Section 4 discusses the data and model specification. Section 5 presents estimates and Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets

Child labour and educational success in Portugal—descriptive analysis

Table 1 presents a break-down of the incidence of child work and the absolute number of working children in four mutually exclusive categories. In 1998, about 12% or 126,000 Portuguese children were involved in some form of work while it fell to about 8% (about 97,000) in 2001. Across the 2 years, the incidence of economic work does not change sharply (3.1% in 1998 and 3.7% in 2001). However, there is a decline in the number of children involved in domestic work. While the decline seems

Analytical approach

Following a large educational production function literature we treat the test scores of children (Y*) as a function of child (C), family (F), socio-economic (SE), educational (E), and demand for labour characteristics (D). In addition, we include hours of economic and domestic work (W) contributed by children. That is,Yi*=Ciβc+FiβF+SEiβSE+EiβE+DiβD+WiβW+εi.

While we do not observe test scores, we do observe whether a child has achieved educational success, that is, whether a child has never

Data, specification and descriptive statistics

Our paper relies on information contained in household surveys conducted in 1998 and 2001. While both surveys are utilised to analyse the incidence of child labour, we use the 2001 survey for our econometric work. Apart from being a more recent survey, the 2001 data has wider geographical coverage. In the 2001 survey, 19,849 households were interviewed and we focus on about 26,000 respondents in the age group 6–15.10

Economic and domestic work

Estimates of the probability of working are in Table 6.13 There are clear gender differences and as children age their work contributions increase. The higher educational attainment of parents is associated with a lower

Concluding remarks

This paper assessed the factors that determine child labour and educational success in Portugal and examined whether the work activities of children hinders their educational success. We found that while increases in income were associated with reduced economic work, variables that captured a household's occupational structure played a large role in determining child labour. Child labour in Portugal is concentrated in the Northern and Central parts of the country, precisely those areas that

Acknowledgements

We thank Margarida Chagas Lopes, Ashwani Saith, Chris Elbers, seminar participants at the Institute of Social Studies and especially two anonymous referees for useful comments. SIETI a recently established government statistics unit and DETEFP the statistics department of the Labour and Training Ministry graciously allowed the use of household surveys on the “Social Characterisation of the Portuguese Household with School Age Children”.

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