The Effect of the Early Entrance to Job Market on the Health Status of the Brazilians in 2008

(ProQuest: . denotes formulae omitted.)1. IntroductionAccording to the International Labor Organization (OIT, 2012), 215 million children work at present, of which about 50% act in derogatory activities. The early entrance of the child to the labor market coerced either by the family or not, prevents them from attending school or, even, from receiving some kind of care (OIT, 2012). Child labor ravages all the continents, including the European one. In Latin America, a few studies which investigate the causes of child labor as well as its consequences, mainly for Brazil, are highlighted.In Brazil, in 2008, 13 % of the population admitted to have begun to work before the 10 years old, which makes worrying the impact of child labor upon the future of those children and consequently upon the process of the economic development of the country (IBGE, 2008). In this sense, Kassouf et al. (2001) and Nicolella et al. (2008) claim that child labor inhibits the development of the child and, afterwards, of the grown-up individual, owing to, among other consequences, the impossibility of attending school. For Vietnam, for instance, Beegle et al. (2009) have found evidence that child labor negatively impacts on school performance.Although, a great part of the works does not stress the effect of the early entrance to the job market upon health, the different ages in which a child goes into the job market possess distinct impacts on the health status of the adult person. In other words, it is expected that children who began to work before the 10 years old are more harmed in relation to the ones who enter between 10 and 15 years, for example. In Brazil, in 2008, 39% of the population admitted to have gone into the job market between 10 and 15 years old (IBGE, 2008). The regional matter is also very important in the surveying of the relationship between child labor and health status, since in regions, as the Brazilian Northeast, the percent of individuals who claimed to have entered the job market before the 10 years old is of 16% (IBGE, 2008). In the Central-Western region, about 15% of the population claimed to have begun in the job market before the 10 years, while in the Southeast region, more developed economically- mainly as far as the industry is concerned - about 10% so stated. In the other regions, North and South, that percent is intermediary, respectively, 13% and 14%. It is advisable to highlight that other factors are also unequal, such as education, income and race and gender question.Therefore, given that context, the present work intends to investigate the relationship between the individual's age of entrance to the job market and his current health status. Strictly speaking, it aims to survey from the construction of age ranges the effect of the delay upon the age of entrance to the job market on the health status.In addition to that piece of information, this work counts, forthwith, with the literature review which is concerned with this theme. Afterwards, both the methodology and the main results obtained are presented. At last, the final remarks are presented.2. General overview of the literature about the impact of child labor on health statusThe literature which is concerned with the theme, although scarce, enables us to characterize in a concrete form, the research theme. Some works stand out for the theoretical discussion and others for the empirical application.The investigation about the health status of the grown-up individual or even of the child is not recent , though; its association with child labor is so. A few pioneering works made use of theoretical models to estimate the health demand. Grossman (1972, 1975) and Wagstaff (1986, 1993) stood out for their pioneering activity in the construction and debate of such models. In Brazil, recently, Oliveira and Goncalves (2012) investigated, specifically, the health demand from models for countable data in which the variable to be explained was the number of consultations. …