Essays on the welfare of children in developing countries
Abstract
My Ph.D. dissertation is composed of essays on child labor in less developed countries. The time allocation of children is important for their current and future welfare, due to its impact on health, productivity and future accumulation of human capital. The aim is to provide an empirical analysis on the determinants of this household decision, and on the evaluation of a specific school subsidy program. The first chapter looks at the household decision-making process : the child labor decision may not only be driven by poverty. For a given level of household income, the identity of the income recipient within the household may also be relevant. I combine ethnographic evidence from Indonesia with detailed micro data that contains information on assets brought to marriage to identify the effects of household bargaining on the decision to send the children to work. I find that bargaining matters for upper income, urban households: the higher the mother's bargaining power, as measured by transfers at marriage and her assets brought to marriage, the lower the probability that her child will be sent to work. The second chapter joint work with Martin Ravallion) looks at a specific policy question related to an anti-poverty program that aims at increasing school attendance and at reducing child labor in Bangladesh. The analysis focuses on the decentralized nature of the program and addresses the question of what explains the targeting performance of a decentralized Food-for-Education program, both at the central and at a local level. We find evidence that villages are better able at targeting the poor than the center. Moreover, differences in the relative power of the poor in local decision making--captured by indicators of social capital and income polarization--matter to the distributional outcomes of the program within villages. Notably, income polarization reduces the ability of reaching the poor. Moreover, local social capital is an important factor in explaining the targeting, though it is not always pro-poor.
Recommended Citation
Emanuela Galasso,
"Essays on the welfare of children in developing countries"
(January 1, 2000).
Boston College Dissertations and Theses.
Paper AAI9970400.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI9970400
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