Child Labor, Schooling, and Poverty in Latin America

Abstract

One of the challenges in designing policies to combat child labor is the puzzling finding from chapter 1 that as economic growth progresses, the pace of reductions in child labor appears to slow. Consequently, policies that raise per capita income may not, by themselves, lower the incidence of child labor. If they do lower child labor, the reductions may only occur over a period of decades. This appears to be the current challenge to reducing child labor in Latin America, where per capita income is now high enough that child labor has become relatively insensitive to further income gains.