The Economics of Child Labour 2e: Education, Fertility, and Infant Mortality in Developing Countries

Children throughout the world are engaged in a variety of activities classifiable as work. These range from relatively harmless, even laudable, activities like helping parents in the home, to morally or physically dangerous ones. Many forms of child labour have valuable learning-by-doing elements, but they all conflict with formal education. If the family is credit constrained, child labour relaxes the liquidity constraint and may be necessary to avoid starvation. Statistically and theoretically, child labour is associated with high fertility, high infant mortality, and low productivity. By contrast, education is associated with low fertility, low infant mortality, and high productivity. Suitable as an advanced development economics or development microeconomics textbook, the book lays out the theory as it now stands and examines the available evidence within an integrated framework.

This second edition emphasizes the interplay between child labour, education, fertility, and mortality.
The empirical aspects have been expanded to include new evidence available since the previous edition and an assessment of the impact of policy and programs. There are new chapters on the emergence and implications of family rules and social norms, and on policy optimization, and an expanded chapter on international trade examines the effects of foreign direct investment.

Alessandro Cigno, Professor of Economics, University of Florence, Furio C. Rosati, Professor of Public Economics, University of Rome

Alessandro Cigno received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics from the University of Birmingham in 1972. He has held permanent or visiting positions at several universities in Europe, the USA, Latin America, and Japan, including, as a Full Professor, Florence, Hull, Pisa, and Wisconsin (Madison). Between 1990 and 2020, he was an Editor of the Journal of Population Economics, and he has served a consultant for the Italian Foreign Ministry, the European Commission, and the World Bank.

Furio Camillo Rosati is a Professor of Public Finance at the University of Tor Vergata, Rome in the Faculty of Economics. He received a Philosophy Doctorate in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1984). He is the Director of CEIS (Center for International Economic Studies) and of ICID (Italian Center for International Development).