now let's consider the economics of
child labor estimates vary and in any
case they're very rough but it's
possible that over two hundred million
children in the world are working today
some good news is that rates of child
labor are falling over time as you can
see in this picture with the lines
representing the different major regions
of the world and the Falls are
substantial if we look at the line for
instance for Africa at about 1950 the
rate of child labor in Africa was almost
40 percent but as of 2010 we can see
that it's somewhat below 25 percent this
picture very much shows that rates of
child labor are declining with wealth
that is once parents have enough money
and they are sure the family is able to
eat they don't really want to send their
children to work this is one of the many
good things about being a wealthier
society here's evidence from Vietnam
showing again that child labor tends to
decline with wealth from 1993 to 1997
Vietnam grew at a rate of about 6 to 7
percent over that same period child
labor went down by about 28 percent what
else do we know about child labor some
of these may be a little surprising
first most children that work are
employed by their parents second most of
these children work in agriculture third
most children that work actually also
attend school although by no means do
they all and finally child labor is
highly responsive to negative income
shocks that is if you have a very poor
family and something very bad happens to
them such as a bad harvest then may that
they may send the children out to work
one argument is that the best way out of
child labor is simply for a society to
become wealthier and then the children
will not be sent so much to work but
there's another point of view which
suggests that in the meantime the law
can bring about an improvement let's
think about how this argument might work
in one version of this view in the labor
market there are multiple
Colibri uh one of them is here and
another of them is here and to think
about what that might mean intuitively
here's how that goes imagine that you
passed a law banning child labor that
would limit the number of individuals in
the workforce it might raise wages
somewhat and perhaps if all of the
children cease working family wages will
be higher and it won't be necessary to
send the children after work but for
this to be successful perhaps you have
to ban child labor across the board oh
we don't know if this argument is true
but it is an argument that has been made
for banning child labor outright and not
simply waiting for societies to become
wealthier another argument for banning
child labor outright is called
the child labor trap and that goes this
way the claim is it's not efficient to
send children out to work ideally it
would make more sense to educate the
child and then have the child pay
parents back overtime with later
earnings but maybe that kind of
arrangement cannot be enforced unless
the parents get what they can out of the
child which is to make the child work
now that means when the child grows up
the child is as then as a parent is not
educated and is much poorer and that
individual will in turn send his or her
children out to work and you're stuck in
a series of generations where each
generation sends the children out to
work but if you could somehow snap this
spring by banning child labor and the
children then get more educated well it
could be the case that the whole series
of generations would be better off for
this argument to be true of course you
probably do need a fairly good
educational opportunity for those
children other economists have argued
that laws against child labor actually
can be counterproductive and might even
lead to more child labor here's a way to
think about it if you pass a law banning
child labor
that means employers of child labor take
on more risk but as we see in the real
world very often the practice still
continues but what happens is that the
children who are working they are now
paid lower wages because hiring them
involves greater risk those children are
paid lower wage
the families are then poorer they have
lower income and they're at the verge of
subsistence so how do they respond they
respond by actually increasing the labor
supply of the other children and sending
even more children out to work because
they need to do so to continue to eat of
these three different mechanisms I've
outlined I would stress that we don't
yet know how true each one of them may
be there are many interesting papers on
child labor but note that data in this
area good data they're really quite hard
to come by but you can read all of these
online and note also the first one
listed by Basu is the source of the
first figure in this video an excellent
survey piece is this one listed here
also online and note it's the source for
our second and third figures in this
video child labor is an important issue
it's very important to think
analytically about it and not just
emotionally but it's also very hard to
do nonetheless this is an introduction
to some of the leading issues