This paper explores the dynamics of voting over mandatory education when parents allocate children's time between school and labor. When poverty keeps a sufficiently high number of children at work rather than in school, the availability of forms of child labor that provide skill-enhancimg learning-by-doing cam be essential for compulsory education laws to emerge in a steady state. In poor countries where poor children are involved in th forms of child labor that provide too little or no learning-by-doing, such laws may fail to win political support thereby causing the economy to fall into a poverty trap. This paper therefore support the view that certain forms of child labor, particularly the most harmful ones should be banned, to allow poor family children to enter only those forms of child labor that provide learning-by-doing.

Download Info

To download:

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

Publisher Info

Paper provided by Université Laval - Département d'économique in its series Cahiers de recherche with number 0209.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: 2002
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:lvl:laeccr:0209

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Pavillon J.A. De S�ve, Qu�bec, Qu�bec, G1K 7P4
Phone: (418) 656-5122
Fax: (418) 656-2707
Email:
Web page: http://www.ecn.ulaval.ca
More information through EDIRC

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Johanne Perron).

Related research

Keywords: Child labor; Education; Learning-by-doing; Compulsory education laws;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
O12 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

• NEP-ALL-2003-04-09 (All new papers)

Did you know? Over 80% of the top 1000 economists are registered on RePEc.

This page was last updated on 2009-12-15.