Abstract
This paper explores empirically within-household gender and sibling differences in child labor, domestic work, and schooling of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan children. The main results show that older boys spend more time engaged in market and domestic work, whereas older girls spend more time in domestic work than their younger siblings. These results are independent of whether the younger sibling is a boy or a girl, which suggests that there is no substitution within the household of younger for older siblings in market and domestic work. This paper’s findings show the relevance of domestic work and gender differentials in children’s allocation of time in developing countries.
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Employment may harm children’s intellectual and physical development with consequent negative effects on school performance and attendance (Gunnarsson et al. 2006; Heady 2003). It can also affect their health (Graitcer and Lerer 1998). In poor economies, however, not all forms of child labor are necessarily “bad” because such labor may contribute to household income that improves child outcomes (Blunch and Verner 2001) by introducing a child to work activities and survival skills (Grootaert and Kanbur 1995). Child labor may also increase returns to work over short time horizons if the return to experience outweighs the return to education (Beegle et al. 2006).
I can use twins as an instrument for family size to overcome the endogeneity problem (Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980). One of the shortcomings of using household surveys, however, is that twins occur in only a small fraction of births. For example, only one percent of children aged 7 to 14 years have a twin brother or sister in the Guatemala data. Another option is to use sibling-sex composition as an instrument. As Schultz (2007) points out, however, this instrument might not be valid in contexts where a child’s sex involves many culturally distinct costs and benefits for his or her parents, thus affecting child time allocation. In addition, two-sibling composition might not be valid in countries with son preferences (Lee 2008).
The evidence is also mixed for developed countries. Some papers find a negative effect of sibship size (also referred to as the number of siblings or family size) on children’s educational attainment, even controlling for family socioeconomic background (e.g., Blake 1981) and considering the endogeneity of the fertility decision using twins (e.g., Berhman et al. 1989) in the USA. Other papers failed to find significant effects, for example, on wages (Kessler 1991) and dropout and school grade progression (Cáceres-Delpiano 2006). Furthermore, Black et al. (2005) find that children in one-child families perform worse in various schooling outcomes than those with siblings in Norway.
The Guatemalan Labor Code sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years. Children under the age of 14 can work if the work is related to an apprenticeship, is light work of short duration and intensity, is necessary due to conditions of extreme poverty within the child’s family, and enables the child to meet compulsory education requirements. In those cases, the workday for minors under the age of 14 years is limited to 6 h. The Nicaraguan Labor Code sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years (Source: Bureau of International Labor Affairs, http://www.dol.gov/ilab/).
I do not include time spent shopping in Guatemala to facilitate comparison between the two countries. In addition, it may pick up other effects such as distance to markets. The Nicaraguan LSMS does not ask for each activity but asks about household chores in the last week, where household chores refer to ironing, cleaning, fetching water, helping siblings do homework, taking care of siblings, helping disabled family members and the elderly, among others. The Guatemalan LSMS asks for the number of hours and minutes spent on each activity the day before the day of the survey. I assume that children allocate the same amount of time each day doing household chores during the week.
The International Labor Organization distinguishes between children engaged in an economic activity and child labor. The former is a broad concept that encompasses most productive activities by children, including unpaid and illegal work as well as work in the informal sector. The latter is a narrower concept excluding all those children 12 years and older who are working only a few hours a week in permitted light work and those 15 years and above whose work is not classified as “hazardous” (ILO 2002). Using household surveys, it is not possible to distinguish between hazardous and non-hazardous work.
It is important to recognize that because the data is based on a household survey, it may not take into account some children who may no longer live with their parents. Since most children move out of the house at a later age, restricting the sample to children aged at most 14 might attenuate the problem.
It may also matter if the elder boy is a boy or a girl. The data, however, provide information only for children living in the household. If the probability of moving out of the household is correlated with gender (i.e., teenage boys have higher probability of living outside their households than teenage girls), the estimate of the labor supply of the child on the gender of the older siblings may be biased.
Unreported regressions show similar results of age rank as the ones presented before if I include age spacing in the age rank equation. It is very difficult, however, to disentangle which effect is more important, the effect of age rank or the distance between siblings, since they are closely interrelated.
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I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from the editor and three anonymous referees. Any errors or omissions are my own responsibility.
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Dammert, A.C. Siblings, child labor, and schooling in Nicaragua and Guatemala. J Popul Econ 23, 199–224 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-008-0237-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-008-0237-0