remittance effects on child labour evidence from burkina faso abstractthis article explores the effects of remittance receipt on child labour in an african context we focus on burkina faso a country with a high prevalence of child labour and a high rate of migration given the complex relationship between remittance receipt and household time allocation decisions we instrument remittances using economic conditions in remittance sending countries and explore heterogeneous effects across different types of potential remitters while remittances have no significant effect on child labour on average transfers reduce child labour in long term migrant households for whom the disruptive effect of migration is no longer felt we find no gender difference but remittances seem to affect mainly the labour market participation of younger children

remittances schooling and child labor in mexico abstract this paper studies the effects of remittances from the u s on child labor and school attendance in recipient mexican households we identify these effects using the impact of the 2008 2009 u s recession on remittance receipts the methodology employed is a differences in differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never recipient households to avoid possible selection problems we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group we find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

child labor and agricultural shocks this paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor in particular we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks using data from a household panel survey in tanzania we find that both relationships are significant we investigate mechanisms that could account for these results including buffer stocks and borrowing

creative cities creative spaces and urban policy the paper presents the results of an international study of creative industry policies and strategies based on a survey of public sector creative city initiatives and plans and their underlying rationales as well as this survey and an accompanying literature review interviews were carried out with senior policy makers and intermediaries from europe north america africa and south east asia the paper considers the scope and scale of so called new industrial clusters in local cultural and creative quarters and sub regional creative hubs which are the subject of policy interventions and public private investment the semantic and symbolic expansion of the cultural industries and their concentration in once declining urban and former industrial districts to the creative industries and now to the knowledge and experience economy is revealed in economic sectoral and spatial terms whilst policy convergence and emulation are evident manifested by the promotion of creative spaces and industry clusters

international migration and gender discrimination among children left behind this paper considers how international migration of the head of household affects the allocation of resources toward boys relative to girls within households remaining in the home country i address the endogeneity of migration with a differences in differences style regression model that compares those households in which migrants have already returned home with those in which migrants are still away the evidence suggests that while the head of household is away a greater fraction of resources are spent on girls relative to boys but upon his return this pattern is reversed

remittances financial development and growth abstract despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied this paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth in particular how local financial sector development influences a country s capacity to take advantage of remittances using a newly constructed dataset for remittances covering about 100 developing countries we find that remittances boost growth in countries with less developed financial systems by providing an alternative way to finance investment and helping overcome liquidity constraints this finding controls for the endogeneity of remittances and financial development does not depend on the particular measure of financial sector development used and is robust to a number of robustness tests including threshold estimation we also provide evidence that there could be an investment channel trough which remittances can promote growth especially when the financial sector does not meet the credit needs of the population

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

child labor in the global economy few issues in developing countries draw as much popular attention as child labor this paper begins by quantifying the extent and main characteristics of child labor it then considers the evidence on a range of issues about child labor fundamentally child labor is a symptom of poverty low income and poor institutions are driving forces behind the prevalence of child labor worldwide this study concludes by assessing the policy options to reduce worldwide child labor

remittances liquidity constraints and human capital investments in ecuador summary over the last decade ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers this paper investigates how remittances via trans national networks affect human capital investments through relaxing resource constraints and facilitate households in consumption smoothing by reducing vulnerability to economic shocks our results show that remittances increase school enrollment and decrease incidence of child work especially for girls and in rural areas furthermore we find that aggregate shocks are associated with increased work activities while remittances are used to finance education when households are faced with these shocks 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

school attendance child labour and remittances from international migration in el salvador abstract international migrant remittances can increase household budget and reduce liquidity constraint problems generating consumption and investment opportunities for recipient households in particular remittances can enable investing in children s human capital and reduce child labour key outcomes from the perspective of growth in a developing country using data for el salvador this article shows a a null or insignificant overall impact of remittances on schooling b a strong reduction of child wage labour in remittance recipient households and c an increase in unpaid family work activities for children in those households moreover the evidence shows important differences by gender and age of the child in consideration while girls seem to indeed increase school attendance upon remittance receipts by reducing labour activities boys do not benefit on average from higher schooling but some time substitution takes place favouring family work activities over paid jobs and among secondary sc

the great depression and output persistance the persistence of shocks to aggregate output has been the subject of continuing investigation since nelson and plosser 1982 suggested they are largely permanent recent literature reaches mixed conclusions largely due to disagreement about how to treat the great depression we estimate output persistence based on a parametric bootstrap of a markov switching model for gdp 1870 1994 in which the economy can switch in and out of a turbulent state our results suggest that real shocks persist indefinitely if we drop the maintained assumption of homoskedasticity in favor of a markov switching representation of the great depression

market imperfections and child labor summary this article looks into the relationship between market imperfections and child labor a rural household model shows that households with medium sized plots may increase child labor when the labor market improves contrary to the others we estimate the relationship between child labor and various measures of market imperfections in madagascar controlling for a large set of village characteristics and district fixed effects on average market imperfections increase child labor but the effects are heterogenous by land ownership and consistent with the model an improvement of markets is associated to a decrease in child labor which is suggestive of new policies to fight against child labor

the uncertain trend in u s gdp abstract several recent papers conclude that gdp is trend stationary implying that all shocks are transitory we re examine the evidence in light of test size distortion due to data based lag selection and departures from the maintained hypothesis of temporal homogeneity and find both effects trigger false rejections of the unit root hypothesis when it is true and signal the presence of permanent shifts in trend that did not occur trend stationarity is not supported by the more homogeneous post war data but if imposed implies cycles of implausible duration and pattern 1997 output was 8 below trend

the global and local dimensions of place making remaking shanghai as a world city shanghai the largest socialist industrial city in china is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces this paper provides a preliminary account of remaking this city into a world city the case study suggests the tremendous and pervasive impact of globalisation on the city in transitional economies although it is still not comparable with a truly global city the growth of inward investment particularly its penetration into real estate development has exerted direct impacts on the urban structure it is argued that however that this global influence can only be realised through the coincidence of indigenous changes in the political economy system specifically the willingness of the central government to give more autonomy to local governments the new policy to set up a window for china s open policy the incentive for making money from selling the space the injection of public money into infrastructure and fierce promotional development strategies all contributed to the process of urban restructuring the effect of combined global and local changes has led to an extremely optimistic growth atmosphere and a building boom since the mid 1990s shanghai highlights the local as well as the global dimensions of urban change in the post socialist economies

creative industry clusters and the entrepreneurial city of shanghai this article evaluates the impact of creative industry clusters on urban entrepreneurialism in shanghai it aims to introduce the concept of creative industry clusters into the discussion of the entrepreneurial city in china by testing two main arguments regarding the role of creative industry clusters and to develop the concept of entrepreneurial city in china the major argument is that although these clusters are playing an important role in upgrading the city s entrepreneurial features particularly in attracting business they have made a limited contribution to fostering talent or boosting creative industry entrepreneurship three features of the entrepreneurial city of shanghai are the government s stance of attracting capital and professionals the continuation of urban commodification in character and the innovativeness of diversified forms of urban commodities within current urban policies such new forms of commodities however do not serve as new strategies designed specifically for

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

international migration remittances and schooling evidence from el salvador abstract we examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households schooling decisions using data for el salvador following the massive war related emigration of the 1980s remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s we use the cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances we find that remittances have a large significant effect on school retention we estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small though significant impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school in urban areas the effect of remittances is at its smallest 10 times the size of the effect of other income in rural areas the effect of remittances is about 2 6 times that of other income our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance particularly in poor areas may have a large impact on school attendance and retention even if parents have low levels of schooling

how do remittances affect human capital formation of school age boys and girls we revisit the impact of remittances on educational attainment of school age children in nepal paying particular attention to differences between girls and boys a heightened interest in understanding the impact of remitting practices on a variety of economic variables has emerged as remittances to developing countries continue to rise in nepal the world bank reports that remittances amounted to 1 2 billion us dollars in 2005 while gdp was 8 2 billion and official development assistance totaled 425 million world bank 2007 we use the 1995 1996 nepal living standards survey nlss to examine the impact of remittances on human capital investments for female and male children if remittances do affect human capital positively then not only will remittances affect long run growth in nepal but the opportunities for women in nepal should improve as the female population becomes more educated the effect of remittances on human capital investment is unclear a priori increasing income through remittances may increase investment in children s schooling by relaxing household budget and capital constraints conversely household absenteeism pressures children to work in the home reducing time for education our data provide an opportunity to separate the effect of household disruption from the income effect of remittances on the decision to invest in schooling we are able to measure the number of adults living outside the household so that we may control for absenteeism in estimating the impact of remittances on household schooling choices we ask if the impact varies by gender and age group young child versus older child our results indicate that young children benefit more from remittances but the benefits controlling how do remittances affect human capital formation of school age boys and girls

the great depression and output persistence a reply to papell and prodan in a letter to this journal papell and prodan 2004a hereafter pp conduct unit root tests for annual u s real gdp 1870 1998 that allow for off setting level shifts in the trend following papell and prodan 2004b pp report p values of about 0 01 from a parametric bootstrap of their regression equation under homoskedasticity but 0 05 if the bootstrap is instead based on the unobserved components representation of murray and nelson 2002 hereafter mn which was designed to incorporate into the null the heteroskedastic turmoil of the great depression and wwii pp reach two conclusions first contrary to mn the evidence favors the alternative hypothesis of a trend stationarity for longrun u s gdp with off setting level shifts during the depression wwii period since this structural change is restricted to be transitory an implication of their model is that there were no permanent shocks to gdp from 1870 to 1998 second pp conclude that rejection of the unit root in favor of trend stationarity with offsetting level breaks is not subject to the mn critique that heteroskedasticity matters we consider pp s second point first it seems to us that there is a very great difference between a p value of 0 01 under homoskedasticity and 0 05 under heteroskedasticity as measures of the strength of the evidence against the unit root hypothesis though many economists may regard 0 05 as sufficient for rejection some may care whether the probability of a type 1 error is 1 in 100 or 1 in 20 in that sense the mn critique does matter

the impact of remittances on investment and poverty in ghana summary this paper analyzes the impact of internal remittances from ghana and international remittances from african or other countries on investment and poverty in ghana it has three findings first when compared to what they would have spent without the receipt of remittances households receiving remittances spend less at the margin on food second households receiving remittances spend more at the margin on three investment goods education housing and health third the receipt of remittances greatly reduces likelihood of household poverty these findings support the growing view that remittances can reduce poverty and increase investment in developing countries

the cyclical component of u s economic activity quarterly data on industrial production and deflated gross national product in the united states from 1947 through 1985 are decomposed into independent nonstationary trend and stationary cycle components using kalman filtering and smoothing techniques estimates of the model parameters imply that at least half of the quarterly innovation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a stationary cyclical component that persists over periods of time as long as five years this finding is inconsistent with the hypothesis that most of the apparent variation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a nonstationary trend component

the estimation of prewar gross national product methodology and new evidence the paper develops new methodology for the estimation of prewar gnp taps previously unused data sources and develops new estimates for the periods 1869 1908 and 1869 1928 primary among the new data sources are direct measures of output in the transportation communications and construction sectors and estimates of the consumer price index new measures of real gnp nominal gnp and the gnp deflator are developed the new estimates of real gnp are as volatile on average over the business cycle as the traditional kuznets kendrick series but dampen the amplitude of some cycles while raising the amplitude of others the new estimates of the gnp deflator are distinctly less volatile than the traditional series and in fact no more volatile than those in the postwar period

restricted structural change and the unit root hypothesis i introduction an important issue in economics involves the long run response of macroeconomic and financial aggregates to shocks and disturbances in a classic paper nelson and plosser 1982 argued that contrary to the traditional view current shocks have permanent effects on the long run level of macroeconomic time series using statistical techniques developed by dickey and fuller 1979 they found evidence in favor of unit roots for 13 out of 14 long term annual macro series the only exception being the unemployment rate they conclude that these series behave more like a random walk than like transitory deviations from a steadily growing trend 1 nelson and plosser s findings of a unit root have been called into question on a number of grounds rudebusch 1992 1993 demonstrates that unit root tests have low power against estimated trend stationary alternatives moreover he shows that if trend stationary models are correct difference stationary models do not yield good approximations to the medium term dynamic response perron 1989 questions the ability of unit root tests to distinguish unit root from stationary processes that contain segmented or shifted trends incorporating an exogenous break point and specifying 1929 as the break date he found evidence of broken trend stationarity for 10 out of the 13 series perron s analysis was disputed by several papers most notably christiano 1992 banerjee lumsdaine and stock 1992 and zivot and andrews 1992 these authors argued that it is inappropriate to specify the break date as known as it is not reasonable to believe that the choice has been made independently of the data 2 they suggest that an appropriate procedure is to select the break date endogenously in particular zivot and andrews 1992 using a data dependent algorithm to determine the break point and finite sample critical values reject the unit root null at the 5 significance level for only 3 out of 13 nelson plosser series real gross national product gnp nominal gnp and industrial production 3 once this is done there is again little evidence against the unit root hypothesis allowing for two endogenous breaks lumsdaine and papell 1997 reexamined the unit root hypothesis for the nelson plosser data using finite sample critical values they rejected the unit root null for five series the three series found by zivot and andrews plus per capita real gnp and employment therefore finding more evidence against unit roots than zivot and andrews these studies reject the unit root hypothesis in favor of broken trend stationarity for macroeconomic aggregates but not for prices or financial variables this seems to confirm not only the common practice of macroeconomists to model movements in real gnp as stationary fluctuations around a linear deterministic trend blanchard 1981 kydland and prescott 1980 but also previous analyses which had advanced the unit root hypothesis for the velocity of money gould and nelson 1974 and stock prices samuelson 1973 results of the previous studies show that for many of the aggregate time series the estimated breaks coincide with world wars or the great depression standard macroeconomic theory however argues that while these events have long lasting transitory effects they do not have permanent effects on aggregate variables the decline in output associated with the great depression has generally been interpreted as a temporary response to a significant reduction in the money stock friedman and schwartz 1963 and the substantial increase in output that occurred during world war ii is described as the result of the huge temporary increase in government purchases caused by the war barro 1981 murray and nelson 2000 studying long term real gross domestic product gdp data argued that the fluctuations of 1930 1946 seem to have had a temporary effect on the level of output and lead to rejections of the unit root hypothesis when it is true

child labor and household wealth theory and empirical evidence of an inverted u some studies on child labor have shown that at the level of the household greater land wealth leads to higher child labor thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty this paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market we develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted u relationship between land holdings and child labor using a unique data set that has child labor hours it is found that controlling for child household and village characteristics the turning point beyond which more land leads to a decline in child labor occurs around 4 ac of land per household c 2009 published by elsevier b v

how do migration and remittances affect human capital investment the effects of relaxing information and liquidity constraints abstractthis article explores the heterogeneous effects of the migration remittance process on the educational attainment of nepalese children the results suggest that when controlling for remittances the children of more educated or informed parents suffer from parental absence while the children of less informed parents gain from migration implying that the migration experience helps less educated parents estimate the value of and returns to education more precisely the results also suggest that remittances help severely credit constrained households enrol their children in school and prevent dropouts these remittances help households that face less severe liquidity constraints increase their investment in quality education