Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox

This article is motivated by the remarkable observation thatchildren of land-rich households are often more likely to bein work than the children of land-poor households. The vastmajority of working children in developing economies are inagricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by theirfamilies. Land is the most important store of wealth in agrariansocieties, and it is typically distributed very unequally. Thesefacts challenge the common presumption that child labor emergesfrom the poorest households. This article suggests that thisapparent paradox can be explained by failures of the marketsfor labor and land. Credit market failure will tend to weakenthe force of this paradox. These effects are modeled and estimatesobtained using survey data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. Themain result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls inboth countries, whereas for boys it disappears after conditioningon other covariates.