The puzzle of ‘‘idle’’children: Neither in school nor performing economic activity: Evidence from six countries

Type Working Paper - Understanding Children’s Work Project Working Paper Series
Title The puzzle of ‘‘idle’’children: Neither in school nor performing economic activity: Evidence from six countries
Author(s)
Issue 43873
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2003
URL http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2008/05/27/000333038_20080527​020321/Rendered/PDF/438730WP0Box321en13nov200301PUBLIC1.pdf
Abstract
This paper presents a set of descriptive statistics on the observed group of children
that neither attends school nor performs economic activity. Drawing on datasets from
six countries, evidence is provided suggesting that children can be absent from both
school and economic activity because they are needed to perform household chores,
because of their health, or because they are unable to find work after having left
school. But a large proportion of children not in school or economic activity does not
fall into any of these categories. A simple theoretical model of household decisions
concerning children’s time allocations is presented in an attempt to account for this
“unexplained” portion of the group of children absent from school and economic
activity.

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