People of color

[mrdmk]

26. I am suprised that Gingrich has not been laughed off of the National Stage by now, what a ass-hat!

From the Book, ‘Economic Development’ Ninth Edition by Michael P. Todaro and Stephen C. Smith
Page 372 to 373

Child Labor

Child labor is a widespread problem in developing countries. When children under age 14 work, their labor time disrupts their schooling and in majority of cases prevents them from attending school altogether. Compounding this, the health of child workers is significantly worse, even accounting for their poverty status, than that of children who do not work; physical stunting among child laborers is very common. In addition, a large fraction of laboring children are subject to especially cruel and exploitative working conditions.

The International Labor Office (ILO), a UN body that has played a leading role on the child labor issue, recently estimated that some 120 million children in developing countries between the ages of 5 to 14 are working full time, with another 130 million working half time. Some 61% of the 250 million working children, or nearly 153 million, live in Asia, while 32%, or 80 million, live in Africa, and 7%, or over 17 million, live in Latin America. Although Asia has the largest number of child laborers, in relative terms, Africa has the highest child labor rate, estimated at about 41% of all children between 5 and 14 years old. the rates for Asia and Latin America are 21% and 17%, respectively. These numbers do not even include the many children who work full time at home for their parents or guardians. Working conditions are often horrendous; the ILO reports that some of surveys show that more than half of working children toil for nine or more hours per day. Moreover, at least 180 million child laborers are either under 14 years of age or work in conditions that endangers their health or well-being, involving hazards, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and debt bondage. This includes 110 million children under the age of 15 doing hazardous work. Some 73 million working children are under the age of 10, effectively working as indentured servants. They earned less than half the adult wage and often worked in excess of 80 hours per week, many in carpet- and brick-making factories. Thus child labor is not an isolated problem, but a pervasive one, especially in Africa and South Asia.

Nevertheless, it is not obvious that an immediate ban on all forms of child labor is always in the best interests of the child. Without work, a child may become severely malnourished; with work, school fees as well as basic nutrition and health care may be available. But there is one set of circumstances under which both the child laborer and the family as a whole may be unambiguously better off with a ban on child labor: multiple equilibria. Kaushik Basu has provided such an analysis, and we first consider his simple model that shows how this problem may arise.

To model child labor, we make two important assumptions: First, a household with a sufficiently high income world not send its children to work. As one might hope, there is strong evidence that this is true, at least most of the time. Second, child and adult labor are substitutes. In fact, children are not as productive as adults, and adults can do any work that children can do. This assertion is not an assumption; it is a finding of many studies of the productivity of child laborers in many countries. It is important to emphasize this, because on rationalization for child labor often heard is that children have special productive abilities, such as small fingers, that make them important for the production of rugs and other products. However, there is no support for this view. In essentially every task that has been studied, including carpet weaving, adult laborers are significantly more productive. As a result, we can consider the supply of adult and child labor together in an economic analysis of the problem.

The book goes on to explain mathematically; child labor does not benefit the economy because of the production of the child is lower compared to an adult, the money paid to a child is less as an adult leading a contraction of the economy, and most of all, having a working child and non-working adult in the family will lead more debt. Subsequently, a society that allows working children not going to school and non-working adults will lead to extreme poverty (possible slavery) for that society as a whole.

In addition, the book explains child labor needs to halted worldwide in moderate fashion, i.e. slowly, not expanding it as Newt Gingrich would lead us to believe!