Examining Child Labor and Parental Altruism from the Rural-Urban Divide: Extending the Inverted-U Empirics

Type Working Paper
Title Examining Child Labor and Parental Altruism from the Rural-Urban Divide: Extending the Inverted-U Empirics
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2017
URL http://nesranetwork.com/admin/images/pdf/20170421043933child labour and parental altruism from the​rural-urban divide.pdf.pdf
Abstract
Extending the current empirical discourse on the inverted-U to cover non-farm households,
this paper replaces the land size (proxy for wealth) with a fully-composed household income
from the GLSS6 data that incorporates the value of land and five other components as
income. After choosing the ZIP model over the PRM, based on the corrected versions of the
Vuong test, the findings supported the inverted-U relationship between household income and
child labour. This implies that, at lower levels of income, parents are non-altruistic, using
more child labourers with increases in income but become altruistic towards their children at
income levels beyond GH₵11,656.2760 ($5,834.26) for all households; GH₵11,308.3877
($5,660.14) and GH₵22,026.4658 ($11,024.81) for the rural and urban households
respectively. The analysis showed that rural-located parents become altruistic at relatively
lower levels of income compared to their urban counterparts. Policy should aim at increasing
the average income of households.

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