Schooling Costs and Child Work in Rural Pakistan
研究了巴基斯坦农村入学成本对儿童在家庭内和市场中的劳动的不同影响，发现降低入学成本对减少市场儿童劳动有效，但对家庭内儿童劳动无显著作用。
A conventional argument in the child–labour debate is that improvements in access to schools are an effective way to reduce the labour force participation of children. It is argued that schooling competes with economic activity in the use of children's time, and enhanced access to schools, interpretable as reduction in schooling costs, may raise school attendance at the expense of child labour. In this article, we draw a distinction between child labour within the household (intra-household) and child work in the labour market (extra-household), and examine the separate effects of schooling costs upon these two types of child labour in rural Pakistan. Consistent, at least in part, with our theoretical framework, we find that extra-household child labour and schooling costs are positively related whereas intra-household child labour is insensitive to changes in the costs of schooling. Our results suggest that reduction in schooling costs will have limited success in the abatement of child labour in rural Pakistan.