The Decision between Schooling and Child Labor

Child labor is still a topical question regardless of many years' battle against it. In this thesis I will consider the connection between schooling decisions and child labor prevalence. The underlying question of this thesis is why the prevalence of children's absence from primary education varies across regions of similar poverty. The model in this thesis considers the community attitudes and norms as a factor behind the time allocation decision. The three ways for a child to spend his or her time are school, work and idleness, or in most cases, some combination of these. As we will find out, schooling and working do go hand in hand, but it is also shown that measures to increase schooling do not necessarily decrease working. Many school attending children still continue to work. In this thesis I will introduce briefly an interesting view on why child labor still occurs and that it’s not necessarily always harmful for the child and the family. Policies of education supply and demand are presented as ways to increase schooling propensity. On the supply side the instruments are for example school accessibility, eg. building a school in the community. On the demand side there are different kinds of transfers, which are discussed in theory and there is also an empirical example