The Short and Longer Term impacts of Asset Transfer on Child Labour: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Bangladesh Jinnat Ara Extended Abstract
Statistics show around 168 million children are in child labor in the 5-17 years age group of which 120 million are in child labor in the 5-14 years age; notably, the most significant absolute number of child laborers originate in the Asia Pacific region (ILO 2013). About 93 per cent of child laborers work in the informal sectors such as in small factories and workshops, on the street, in home-based businesses and domestic employment and alarmingly, these activities are mostly outside the purview of the labor laws. Using randomized experimental data, Miller and Tsoka (2012), and Schultz (2004) find positive impact of the conditional cash transfer program on school enrollment and child labor. Several authors find no or negative effect of the program on school attendance, and child labor with non-randomized data (Bauchet et al., 2018; Amarante et al., 2011; Pais et al., 2017). Though the conditional cash transfer program aims to reduce child labor, it remains unsuccessful in reducing labor may be due to small transfers which are not enough to skip the labor (Cardoso and Souza, 2004). Observing these results, it is worth noting that low-income families are likely to send the kids for work parallel to schooling to meet up their family needs. However, Augsburg et al. (2012) also find negative effects of microcredit program on labor supply, and school attendance of young adults using randomized experimental data. Several studies show positive effects of the asset transfers program on income and employment of the adult member, food security, food consumption, asset accumulation, accessing and using of health services, and school enrolment of the children (Barrientos and DeJong, 2004; Bandiera et al., 2016; Krishna et al., 2012; Banerjee et al., 2015). No evidence exists that assess the impact of a randomized asset transfer program on child labor in the long run. Using longitudinal data from Randomized Controlled Trials, this study estimates the effect of BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-Poor (TUP) program on the nature of work of the beneficiary’s children aged 5 to 14 years. Data were collected from 20 sub-districts that cover 13 poorest districts of Bangladesh.1 Though the program aims to provide assets to the main female member of the household for their
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Conduct the survey in 1,309 villages and surveyed four times over a seven year period. The baseline survey
was conducted from May to December 2007. The first and second follow up survey were conducted during JulyDecember 2009, and November 2010-May 2011, respectively. And the third and final round survey was conducted between December 2013 and April 2014.
financial upliftment, we examine the effect of their children’s market and non-market work using a triple differenced model. Our findings show that the likelihood of adopting entrepreneurship increases significantly among the children of participant households in the short, medium, and long run. The findings are driven by girls of participant households who are likely to devote significantly more time on non-agricultural skilled employment in the longer run (i.e. seven years after the intervention). It seems that this reduces their time to study in the short (i.e. two years after the intervention) and long run, especially among 10 to 14 years girls of participant households. Heterogeneous impacts of gender of the household head, age and baseline occupations of the children are observed. Children of maleheaded households are likely to spend less time on agricultural self-employment in the short and long run while dedicating more time on non-agricultural skilled employment in the longer run. Older children are likely to devote more time on agricultural self-employment in the short, medium (i.e. four years after the intervention), and long run. Our findings confirm that grant recipient households are more likely to inject their children into the labor market as found in the literature. However, the program increases the children’s time allocation to self and skilled employment, implying children’s time at work is reallocated away from distress jobs and substituting or complementing the mother’s work.