Many policy instruments can be used to address or affect child labor, even if they are implemented to achieve other objectives. From a theoretical point of view, however, the impact of these policies on child labor is undetermined.
... See More + This paper discusses the evidence generated by rigorous evaluations on the impact on child labor of labor market programs, conditional and unconditional transfers, and microcredit, among other social programs and interventions. The study finds that although transfer programs generally tend to reduce child labor, other policies risk increasing child labor, especially if they affect households' productive opportunities. The findings also point to knowledge gaps that should be addressed in future evaluations. While progress has been made over the past decade, there is still much to learn about the effects of public policy on the labor participation of many children in developing countries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7999 MAR 07, 2017
Dammert,Ana C.; De Hoop,Jacobus Joost; Mvukiyehe,Eric; Rosati,Furio CamilloDisclosed
This is the second and final Progress Report to the Board of Executive Directors (the Board) on the implementation of actions undertaken by Management (as presented in the Management Response) to address concerns from Requesters related to the Uzbekistan: Second Rural Enterprise Support Project (RESP II) and the Additional Financing for the Second Rural Enterprise Support Project (RESP II AF).
... See More + The request raised that due to lack of adequate measures to prevent Bank funding from being used for agricultural lands in which child and forced adult labor (C/FL) is practiced, the project contributes to the government’s policy of organized forced and child labor. In its Report and Recommendation submitted to the Board on December 9, 2013, the Inspection Panel noted and appreciated the significant positive trends that had emerged with respect to the critical issues of child labor, including actions already taken and further commitments and intentions on the part of the Government of Uzbekistan (GoU) and its partners. On November 17, 2014, Bank Management submitted a Progress Report on the Implementation of the Management Actions, stating that all but one action had been successfully completed. On November 20, 2015, the Bank, jointly with the International Labor Organization (ILO), provided a presentation reporting on the progress of the remaining action, which was the implementation of Third Party Monitoring (TPM) and Grievance Redress Mechanism (later renamed FBM). The Bank has made considerable progress in its dialogue with the GoU and its development partners in addressing the systemic issues concerning C/FL in the cotton sector in Uzbekistan. Bank Management continues to implement a multi-faceted approach to the reform of the cotton production system while providing adequate support to the GoU to implement these reforms.As part of the risk mitigation efforts, the Bank is continuing its partnership with the ILO and working on strengthening and improving the operation of TPM/FBM during the 2016 harvest. These activities are also supplemented by broader capacity building efforts aimed to improve labor relations in cotton harvest in Uzbekistan. In addition to that, the World Bank Group is leading a broader dialogue on agricultural modernization, aiming to facilitate systemic changes in the cotton sector and beyond.
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Inspection Panel Report and Recommendation 107735 JUL 28, 2016
The rise in unemployment during an economic crisis poses a significant concern to policy makers. This paper measures the effect of a program in Mexico that granted firms in certain industries wage subsidies if they decided to keep their workers instead of letting them go during the recent economic crisis.
... See More + The analysis uses monthly administrative data on employment at the industry level, along with propensity score matching to construct groups of eligible and ineligible durable goods manufacturing industries that display statistically identical pre-program trends in employment. Difference-in-difference results show a positive but not statistically significant effect of the wage subsidies on employment during the program’s eight-month duration, ranging from 5.7 to 13.2 percent in magnitude, depending on the specification. The size of the effect increases to 24 percent after the program ended and the results indicate that employment after the program recovered faster in eligible industries than in ineligible industries.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7607 MAR 17, 2016
This paper explores the spillover effects of job losses via input linkages during the Great Recession. Exploiting exogenous variation in tradable employment shocks across U.S. counties, the paper finds that job losses in the tradable sectors cause further job losses in local supporting services.
... See More + The result is not due to reverse causation, construction job losses, or credit shortages. In addition, the paper finds that logistic supporting services are relatively more affected by local tradable job losses, while professional supporting services, such as information technology and management consulting, are more affected by the job losses in neighboring counties.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7543 JAN 22, 2016
Overcoming the twin challenges of child labor and educational marginalization will be critical to progress towards the millennium development goals in the Economic commission for West Africa States (ECOWAS) region.
... See More + ECOWAS Ministers recognized the challenge of child labor, and signaled their commitment to addressing it, in developing the ECOWAS child policy and the accompanying strategic plan of action for the ECOWAS child policy 2009-2013, as well as in adopting the West Africa regional action plan to eliminate child labor, especially its worst forms in December 20122 and the follow-up Accra Declaration of the ECOWAS and International Labor Organization (ILO) Symposium on the West Africa regional action plan in May 2013. This report promotes the translation of these plans into concrete action by helping build the evidence base necessary for the design and targeting of specific interventions against child labor. It brings together the most recent available information from a variety of national household surveys to provide a detailed picture of child labor and the related challenge of educational marginalization in the ECOWAS region. The report is structured as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two discusses definitions and data sources as background for the descriptive statistics presented in the subsequent chapters. Chapter three reports both regional and country-specific estimates of children’s involvement in employment and child labor, and how these estimates differ across countries and across population subgroups within countries. Chapter four assesses factors associated with children’s employment. Chapter five looks at the characteristics of children’s employment in order to shed light on children’s workplace reality and their role in the labor force. Chapter six provides a more in-depth look at children’s employment in the agriculture sector, where the overwhelming majority of child workers in ECOWAS are found. Chapter seven assesses the interplay between children’s employment and schooling, and in particular employment as a factor in educational marginalization. Chapter eight reports on out-of-school children, a closely-related policy concern in the ECOWAS region. Chapter nine reviews policy priorities for addressing the issue of child labor.
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The authors investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility.
... See More + Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. The authors also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority ‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.
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Working Paper (Numbered Series) 102310 NOV 01, 2015
Currently 2.5 million Syrians fleeing war have found refuge in Turkey, making it the largest refugee-hosting country worldwide. This paper combines newly available data on the distribution of Syrian refugees across Turkey and the Turkish Labour Force Survey to assess their labor market impact.
... See More + Syrian refugees are overwhelmingly employed informally, since they were not issued work permits, making their arrival a well-defined supply shock to informal labor. Consistent with economic theory our instrumental variable estimates, which also control for distance from the Turkish-Syrian border, suggest large-scale displacement of natives in the informal sector. At the same time, consistent with occupational upgrading, there are increases in formal employment for the Turkish - though only for men without completed high school education. Women and the high-skilled are not in a good position to take advantage of lower cost informal labor. The low educated and women experience net displacement from the labor market and, together with those in the informal sector, declining earning opportunities.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7402 AUG 24, 2015
Del Carpio,Ximena Vanessa; Wagner,Mathis ChristophDisclosed
The plan outlines the key areas of work and approaches that the coalition will adopt over this five year period. It is a living document that will be periodically reviewed and amended to reflect the changes within the coalition, as well as most critically, the changes in context, learning, partnerships, and resource flows that take place before 2020.
... See More + The S4YE coalition has an explicit commitment to work over a period of at least fifteen years to achieve its objectives. This timeline is proportionate to the size and scale of the challenge: of understanding and addressing constraints to employment that young people face. This plan is therefore, the first of three plans that will be developed before 2030.
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Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labor is prevalent. Although many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children’s welfare, in theory their impact on child labor is undetermined.
... See More + This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the impact of cash transfers, conditional and unconditional, on child labor. The authors find no evidence that cash transfer interventions increase child labor in practice. On the contrary, there is broad evidence that conditional and unconditional cash transfers lower both children’s participation in child labor and their hours worked and that these transfers cushion the effect of economic shocks that may lead households to use child labor as a coping strategy. Boys experience particularly strong decreases in economic activities, whereas girls experience such decreases in household chores. The authors findings underline the usefulness of cash transfers as a relatively safe policy instrument to improve child welfare but also point to knowledge gaps, for instance regarding the interplay between cash transfers and other interventions, that should be addressed in future evaluations to provide detailed policy advice. The remainder of this review is organized as follows. Section 1 provides the necessary background. It heuristically describes why the effects of cash transfers on child labor are theoretically undetermined, and it introduces the procedure that we used to identify the relevant studies for this review. Section 2 discusses the impact of two subsets of unconditional cash transfers: programs designed to support poor households’ investments in children’s human capital and old age pension schemes. Section 3 discusses the average impact of conditional cash transfer schemes on the intensive and extensive margin of child labor, the impact of conditional cash transfers on child labor compared to their impact on school participation, heterogeneity by poverty, age, and gender, spillover effects, long-run effects, determinants of program effects, protection from shocks, and variations on the basic conditional cash transfer scheme. Section 4 discusses and concludes.
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This report consists of seven chapters and is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on the minimum wage policy, its historical evolution, and the current institutional context across ASEAN countries.
... See More + Part two delves into the socio?economic impacts of the minimum wage policy on workers, households, firms, the economy, and the ASEAN region. Part III links the findings from each country to the ASEAN regional context and brings all the analysis together into a policy and operational discussion. Specifically, part one of the report includes this chapter (chapter one) and chapter two. The rest of chapter one summarizes the findings from all chapters in the report and presents an overview of lessons detailed in the final chapter. To provide some background and context for the remainder of the report, chapter two briefly describes the history of minimum wage policy around the world and the theoretical principles behind wage setting and its effects. Part two consists of four chapters. Chapter three, which describes how the minimum wage policy is structured and managed in each ASEAN country, includes details on the objectives that countries have set out for the policy and how the policy is enforced in each country. Chapter four summarizes results from primary and secondary empirical research on the impacts of minimum wage changes on employment, wages, and informal work in the four focus ASEAN countries. The discussion in this chapter takes into account the existence of complementary worker protection programs in each country. Chapter five discusses empirical results on whether changes in the minimum wage policy affect poverty and inequality. Since each country has distinct poverty programs, the discussion takes into account the presence of various social programs that potentially complement income earned from wage labor. Chapter six focuses on how wage and labor costs affect firms, especially in terms of investment decisions and productivity. Due to the limited availability of evidence on the impact of minimum wages on firm performance and private sector activity in ASEAN countries, a large part of the discussion in this chapter includes evidence from non-ASEAN countries. Lastly, this chapter reviews the status of the main labor market institutions legislated in the region and provides some evidence on how other labor institutions might interact with the minimum wage policy to shape its effect. Part three comprises chapter seven, which reflects on the material presented in previous chapters and provides policy?oriented insights. It discusses the political economy of the minimum wage policy and draws out the implications of having such diverse wage policies and institutional arrangements for wage management in an increasingly interlinked regional bloc such as ASEAN. The chapter also synthesizes the lessons learned throughout the report and frames the main labor policy issues to provide guidance for, and elicit action from, policymakers going forward.
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As developing economies continue to mature and enter the next phase of reforms, labor market issues and key policy instruments such as the minimum wage increasingly come to the forefront.
... See More + Increased globalization and wider competition compel countries to make labor markets more flexible so as not to hurt competitiveness. At the same time, policymakers face pressure to rethink labor market regulations (and social safety nets) to avoid disadvantaging workers, especially the most vulnerable who are more prone to employment insecurity. Evidence of the impact of minimum wage policies in the East Asian context and in Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, more specifically remains very limited. A thorough literature search identified only a few rigorous studies of the impact of minimum wages on important welfare outcomes in ASEAN countries, and some of the evidence was narrowly focused on one sector and period or from a time when the institutional setup and management of the policy was different from today. Given the relevance of the minimum wage policy in ASEAN economies, which are experiencing rapid economic growth accompanied by rising income inequality and persistent poverty among unskilled workers, having this evidence seems critical. The objective of this report is to contribute to the ongoing (and renewed) debate on the use of minimum wage policy as a tool for addressing various socioeconomic issues. It assumes minimum wages will remain in place, and the analysis seeks to address knowledge gaps on the policy's effects on worker outcomes and firm performance in order to provide guidance to policymakers in ASEAN countries (and similar contexts) on how to best manage the policy. This report consists of seven chapters and is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on the minimum wage policy, its historical evolution, and the current institutional context across ASEAN countries. Part two delves into the socio-economic impacts of the minimum wage policy on workers, households, firms, the economy, and the ASEAN region. Part three links the findings from each country to the ASEAN regional context and brings all the analysis together into a policy and operational discussion.
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This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from a household affects children’s school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia.
... See More + The results indicate that the permanent departure of the father decreases children’s school enrollment by approximately 5 percentage points and increases child labor by 3 percentage points. This paper explores the rollout of a conditional-cash-transfer program during the period of study and shows that this program counteracts these adverse effects. When coupled with other evidence, this finding strongly suggests that the channel through which the father’s departure most affects children is by reducing the income of very poor households, which tightens their liquidity constraints. This finding also highlights the important safety-net role played by welfare programs with respect to disadvantaged households, particularly because these households are unlikely to have formal or informal mechanisms with which to insure themselves against such vagaries.
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Addressing youth issues is essential to promoting stability and preventing violence in fragile and conflict-affected states. However, there is little evidence that youth programming and policies have helped reduce violence in these settings.
... See More + This can reflect the lack of understanding about youth issues and how problems affecting them encourage their participation in violence. This study set out to understand youth violence in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two countries in which there has historically been a great deal of youth participation in group violence, where the risk of youth mobilization into violence persists, and where interpersonal and gender-based violence are still a concern. In addition to having young populations, both countries have governments that have emphasized improving youths' lives by both reducing poverty and preventing violence. In turn, programming and policies in these (and many other conflict-affected) countries tend to be focused on employment generation due to the assumption that youth become prone to violent behavior as the result of economic exclusion (their inability to achieve a stable source of livelihood). The findings from this study will be useful to help governments (particularly of fragile and conflict-affected states) and donors better understand youth issues, design more effective interventions to address youth violence, and promote longer-term stability. The report begins with a review of literature on existing theories of youth exclusion and drivers of youth violence, with a greater focus on history of violence in West Africa. It proceeds with an outline of the study methodology for data collection, sample selection, and analysis. The analysis follows, highlighting key findings. The report concludes with recommendations for policies and youth programming.
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This Papua New Guinea (PNG) Urban Youth Employment Project (UYEP) newsletter includes the following headings: eligibility screening for intake two set for October 29; youths assured eligibility survey fair, transparent; ethnicity no barrier to work; and World Bank commends National Capital District Commission (NCDC), Project Management Unit (PMU) for start of youth project.
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Overcoming the twin challenges of child labor and youth employment will be critical to Indonesia's progress towards the millennium development goals.
... See More + Estimates presented in this report indicate that some 2.3 million Indonesian children aged 7-14 years still work in employment. The current report examines the related issues of child labor and youth employment in the context of Indonesia. The report was developed jointly by the Government and the three Understanding Children's Work (UCW) partner agencies. As such, it provides an important common basis for action in addressing child labor and youth employment issues. Four related objectives are served by the report: 1) improve the information base on child labor and youth employment, in order to inform policy and programmatic responses; 2) promote policy dialogue on child labor and the lack of opportunities for decent and productive work for youth; 3) analyze the relationship between early school leaving, child labor and future status in the labor market; and 4) build national capacity for regular collection and analysis of data relating to child labor and youth employment. The remainder of the report is structured as follows. Chapter two briefly describes the national context, including socio-economic trends and key human development challenges facing the country. A chapter three and four presents descriptive data relating to the extent and nature of children's work, and to how children divide their time between work and school. Chapter five assesses the impact of children's work on their health and educational status. Chapter six employs econometric tools to assess key determinants of children's work and schooling and their implications for policy. Chapter seven assesses the extent of child labor in accordance with national legislation.
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This Understanding Children's Work (UCW) newsletter includes some of the following headlines: about us; featured research; project news; and references.
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The Subcommittee (SC) of the Committee on Development Effectiveness (CODE) considered an Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) approach paper entitled IEG Evaluation on youth employment.
... See More + IEG commented that the evaluation recognizes the significant cost that youth unemployment has for individuals and societies. The evaluation will take stock of international evidence on effectiveness of youth employment initiatives and will identify lessons from World Bank Group (WBG) support. It will use the Bank's MILES framework, focusing on three aspects: skills development and individual attributes, labor market issues pertinent to youth, and firms' demand for young workers in self employment, while also recognizing the importance of macro-economic growth and social protection systems. The evaluation will draw from a number of sources including a review of the Bank' lending portfolio, economic and sector work and country case studies. The analysis will examine where WBG support has reached youth, including young women and poor and disabled young people. Overall findings will help identify factors that affect the success of interventions and inform future lending, technical advice as well as policy dialogue, including the operationalization of the 2013 World Development Report (WDR) on jobs. Members noted that the evaluation will be highly relevant, particularly for regions such as Africa and for fragile and conflict-affected states. A member noted that the WBG does not have a specific strategy for youth employment. Members remarked as to the application of the MILES framework to youth employment as well as to low-income countries. Members recognized the timeliness of the evaluation and broadly supported the approach paper. Both IEG and management looked forward to continued cooperation. IEG noted that both the approach paper and the report to the Board will guide the evaluation process.
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Child labour constitutes an important obstacle to achieving universal primary education and other millennium development goals in Bangladesh. It not only harms the welfare of individual children, but also slows broader national poverty reduction and development efforts.
... See More + Children forced out of school and into labour to help their families make ends meet are denied the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for gainful future employment, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty. The current report provides an overview of the child labour phenomenon in Bangladesh its extent and nature, its determinants, and its consequences on education. The report also addresses the national response to child labour, and policy options for its elimination. The analysis considers the various causes of child labour and follows a cross-sectoral approach, especially in the identification of determinants and strategic options. Particular attention is given to the links between child labour and schooling and to the importance of child labour as a constraint to education for all. Three related objectives are served by the report: (1) to improve the information base on child labour, in order to inform policy and program design; (2) to promote policy dialogue on child labour and accelerated progress towards national child labour reduction targets; and (3) to promote regular child labour data collection and analysis. The remainder of the report is organized as follows. Section two outlines the process by which the report was developed. Section three briefly reviews the national context and the socio-economic conditions underlying the child labour phenomenon in the country. Section four present's descriptive data on the nature and extent of children's work and Section five assesses the sub-group of working children in child labour in accordance with international child labour measurement standards. Section six looks at the educational and health impact of child labour and section seven at factors influencing household decisions to involve their children in work rather than schooling. Section eight discusses the national response to child labour. Section nine looks at policy options for the progressive elimination of child labour.
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