This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of child labor and school enrollment in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. A village fixed-effect logit model for each child is estimated with the incidence of child labor or school enrollment as the dependent variable, in order to investigate individual and household characteristics associated with the incidence. Among the determinants, this paper focuses on whose education matters most in deciding the status of each child, an issue not previously investigated in the context of the joint family system. The regression results show that the education of the child's mother is more important in reducing child labor and in increasing school enrollment than that of the child's father, the household head, or the spouse of the head. The effect of the child's mother is similar on boys and girls while that of the child's father is more favorable on boys.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1746-1049.2006.00024.x

Child labor and school enrollment in rural India: Whose education matters?

Contract Farming in India: Impacts on Women and Child Workers

In this paper I examine through longitudinal survey and case study data the role of HIV and AIDS in the intergenerational transmission of poverty in rural Uganda. I focus on the factors that contribute to chronic poverty in rural Uganda; the patterns of intergenerational transfers and asset inheritance in the study households; the impact on children orphaned by AIDS and on older people of the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and the gender aspects in the transmission of intergenerational poverty in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Data from 15 case study households, drawn from the findings of a longitudinal study of rural households in South-West Uganda, is used to examine these factors.The case study households were or are all headed by women, a number of whom have experienced relationship instability and have as a consequence often struggled to take care of children and grandchildren with little support from partners. Their experience of managing land and property transfers, the provision for children’s education and skill-training and health care are described. I examine the impact on the transmission of poverty to children of HIV and AIDS as well as the same impact on older people. I go on to explore some of the strategies employed by household members to break the cycle of poverty such as migration for waged work and marriage. I then explore some policy implications of the findings: the provision of anti-retroviral therapy, food security as well as access to good education and work and the importance of kin in the provision of support.The findings of this study show how a large network of kin and associates who can help out provides an effective safety net for many poor families in times of need. However, members of poor families who prosper often find themselves with additional mouths to feed that can drain their resources. The conditions in which poverty exist are reproduced through similar mechanisms to those experienced by previous generations; poverty is not therefore ‘transmitted’ so much as recreated because external and internal factors continue to constrain the opportunities to build assets. I conclude that despite the strain that the AIDS epidemic has put on many families the kin network remains a vital safety net in the absence of other social support, yet it is also a leveling force: keeping poor adults and their children poor, as resources are stretched, shared and traded.

/pdf/the-intergenerational-transmission-of-poverty-during-the-1egksatujj.pdf

The intergenerational transmission of poverty during the AIDS epidemic in Uganda

While it is internationally agreed that the worst forms of child labour should be eliminated in order to promote children's welfare, the consensus breaks down when trying to define what constitutes ‘light work’. This article seeks to show why it is difficult to get everyone to agree on this issue, focusing on the definition of child labour proposed by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Defining child labour: a controversial debate

The resilience of the problem of child labour in the global economy has been amply documented, but, we suggest, the reasons for this situation have not yet been fully captured in the associated debates. Our aim is to advance a way of thinking about those forms of child labour which occur in the context of global production networks (gpns), and to contend that greater attention must be paid to the organisation and functioning of gpns, and the social foundations on which they rest, if we are to grasp more fully the conditions and processes which facilitate the persistence and evolution of child labour. The way of thinking we propose is rooted in the concept of ‘adverse incorporation’ in the global economy, which we develop by drawing together currents in gpn analysis and poverty research to explore the commercial and social dynamics in gpns which give rise to these forms of labour exploitation. We illustrate our arguments with reference to the garments industry in New Delhi, India.

The social foundations of global production networks: towards a global political economy of child labour

In the drive for universal education all children not in school have been subsumed as working children. Such a development is ill-advised. This article analyses this changing definition in the context of the Labour Commission Report 2001. With a redefinition of child labour, the number of working children is set at more than, 10 times the official figures available from Census and NSS reports. Such a development only aggravates the problem.

G.C.M. Lieten

Papers

Child Labour in India. Disentangling Essence and Solution