The paper analyzes the implications of a subsidy policy on education and different liberalized trade and investment policies on the incidence of child labour in a developing economy in terms of a three-sector general equilibrium model with informal sector and child labour. The supply function of child labour is endogenously determined. The paper shows that different policies, if undertaken concurrently, may produce mutually contradictory effects, thereby producing little or no impact on the incidence of child labour. The paper provides a theoretical answer as to why the incidence of child labour has not significantly declined in the developing economies in spite of economic development and globalization.

Liberalization’s Children explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between “midnight’s children,” who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and “liberalization’s children,” who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of “consumer citizenship,” Ritty A. Lukose argues that the breakdown of the Nehruvian vision connects with ongoing struggles over the meanings of public life and the cultural politics of belonging. Those struggles play out in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism; reconfigurations of youthful, middle-class femininity; attempts by the middle class to alter understandings of citizenship; and assertions of new forms of masculinity by members of lower castes. Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.

The paper analyzes the implications of a subsidy policy on education and different liberalized trade and investment policies on the incidence of child labour in a general equilibrium framework with endogenous determination of family size and enrollment of children to schools from each poor working family. It shows that these policies, if undertaken concurrently, may produce mutually contradictory effects, thereby producing little or no impact on the incidence of child labour. The paper provides a theoretical answer as to why the incidence of child labour has not significantly declined in the developing economies in spite of economic development and globalization.

Children throughout the world are engaged in a great number of activities classifiable as work. These range from relatively harmless, even laudable, activities like helping parents in their domestic chores, to morally and physically dangerous ones like soldiering and prostitution. If we leave out the former, we are left with what are generally called "economic" activities. Only a small minority, less than 4 percent of all working children, are estimated to be engaged in what ILO defines as the "unconditional" worst forms of child labour. The absolute number of children estimated to be engaged in the latter is, however, a stunning 8.4 million. Should we only be concerned about the worst forms of child labour? Most forms of child labour other than the worst ones have valuable learning-by-doing elements. Furthermore, child labour produces current income. If the family is credit rationed, child labour relaxes the liquidity constraint and increases current consumption. There is thus a trade-off between present and future consumption. To the extent that current consumption has a positive effect on future health (hence, on the child's future earning capacity and, more generally, utility), this trade-off may be lower than one might think. This book provides a blend of theory, empirical analysis and policy discussion. The first three chapters develop a fairly comprehensive theory of child labour, and related variables such as fertility, and infant mortality. Chapter 4, concerned with the effects of trade, contains both theory and cross-country empirical evidence. The remaining chapters are country studies, aimed at illustrating and testing different aspects of the theory in different geographical contexts. These chapters apply the latest developments in microeconometric methodology for dealing with endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and the evaluation of public intervention.

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Economics - Other, grade: 2,0, University of Warwick, course: Topics in Development Economics, language: English, abstract: According to one of the latest reports released by UNICEF in June 2006, more than 190.7 million children aged 5-14 years are currently engaged in child labour. While the Asian and Pacific regions harbour the largest absolute number of child workers (127.3 million, 19%), it is Sub-Saharan Africa which has the highest participation rate (29%, 48 million). Many of these children are forced into debt bondage, are misused as soldiers in armed conflicts or trafficked into prostitution. Other estimates from the ILO state that in 1995 there were up to 120 million children under the age of 15 carrying out paid work . This figure, it claims, would rise to 250 million if part-time work and household activities were to be included as ‘child labour’. Obviously the estimates can vary widely depending on the data used and the definition of ‘work’ and ‘child’ but the ILO Convention No. 138 of 1973 seems to be a reasonable benchmark. It sets the minimum age for the admission to employment or work to at least 15 years. Children below that age are consequently regarded as economically active if the work they perform prevents them from a proper school attendance. This essay aims to describe and evaluate the different policies proposed to curb child labour.

The paper analyzes the implications of trade liberalization on the incidence of child labour in a two-sector general equilibrium framework. The supply function of child labour has been derived from the utility maximizing behaviour of the working families. The paper finds that the effect of trade liberalization on the incidence of child labour crucially hinges on the relative factor intensities of the two sectors.