The Puzzle of 'Idle' Children: Neither in School nor performing Economic Activity: Evidence from six Countries

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.