The effect of early childhood malnutrition on child labor and schooling in rural ethiopia

The long term effects of malnutrition in early childhood on the child’s physical stature have been widely investigated over the last few decades. A number of empirical studies show that malnutrition shocks in early childhood lead to long-lasting deficiencies in the physical fitness of the person, especially in terms of height. Other studies also show that better physical stature is strongly associated with higher cognitive ability and better educational attainment. However, previous studies have paid little attention to the role physical fitness may play in influencing the choice parents make in selecting their child for child labor activities and how this association may influence the accuracy of the estimated relationships between schooling and physical stature. This paper examines how physical stature of a child measured in terms of age standardized height influences his/her selection for family labor activities versus schooling in rural Ethiopia. Two-stage bivariate probit models are estimated for child labor and schooling using malnutrition caused by exposure to weather shocks in early childhood as a source of identification for the child’s physical stature. The first stage results show that exposure to significant weather shocks during the first three years of the child’s life generally have a lasting negative effect on his/her age standardized heights measured later in life. The effect is particularly strong when the child is exposed to the weather shock during his/her second year of life. Estimation results also indicate that physically more robust children are more likely to combine child labor and schooling than those children who are physically less fit. On the other hand, I find no evidence that better physical stature of the child leads to higher probability of his/her selection for fulltime child labor activities. The findings are consistent across two different cohorts of children and two different identification strategies. Estimation results for both the older and younger cohort of children in my sample show that better access to early childhood nutrition can improve the child’s prospects for attending schooling but may also put the child in additional pressure to participate in family labor activities which may be reflected in poor performance in schooling. These findings imply that policies intended to promote schooling through nutrition support programs could be more effective if they are accompanied by programs (such as income support schemes in the form of conditional cash transfers) that could mitigate the parents’ need for child labor.