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The Issue Of Child Labor

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The issue of child labor has drawn significant attention since early 1990s as many labor union and special interest groups advocate banning import of goods produced by the child labor in developing countries and the international consensus in the form of Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) which is widely ratified in 1989 by countries (Boyden, Ling and Myers, 1998). However, concern regarding child labor is not new and can be dated back to industrial revolution, especially late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in England many parents were helpless but to send their children to work to cope the increasing poverty and inequality. (Horrell and Humphries, 1995; Edmonds, 2007). Nevertheless, before the industrial revolution and …show more content…

There have been steady decline in the incidence of child 's exposure to hazardous work and child labor on balance. However, the recent estimates of child labor are still astonishingly high and the trend predict even slower pace of decline in child labor. According to ILO report in 2012, for age group 5-17 years 16.7 percent (or 264,427 in absolute number) of children are in some form of employment, 10.6 percent (equivalently 167,956) is considered as child labor, and 5.4 percent (equivalently 85,344) is involved in hazardous work. Although these figures are lower than the corresponding figures in 2000, the absolute numbers of child labor are still very high (ILO 2013). Policy measures adopted to reduce child labor are derived from an increasing number of theoretical and empirical research on this issue specially since late 1990s. Theoretical studies use the household decision making model to explain the incidence of child labor and attempt to find the determinants of child labor. Initial models that attempt to explain the phenomenon of child labor assume an exploitative household where child is considered household 's asset and parents are the sole decision maker who maximizes their welfare disregarding the welfare of child. In these models parents are selfish and child labor is chosen if it maximizes household welfare which may disregard

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