Trinidad and Tobago to 74 percent in Sierra Leone (see Figure 1). For the sample as a whole, we estimate a standard deviation of 16.7 percentage points, yielding a coefficient of variation of 78.4 percent. We also find that the coefficient of variation in child economic activity rates varies markedly between regions, ranging from less than 40 percent in LAC and MNA to over 80 percent in Easter Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and East Asia and Pacific region (EAP).

How much of the total spatial variation in child economic activity rates in our sample can we separately attribute to variation _within_ and _between_ regions? Undertaking a one-way analysis of variance, we find that roughly 37 percent of the variation in economic activity rates across countries is attributable to between-region variation, while the remaining 63 percent is attributable to within-region variation, suggesting that the latter is a relatively more important factor in explaining total variation. This result however does not imply that mean child economic activity rates do not differ between regions. In fact, the differences in mean child economic activity rates across regions are highly statistically significant.<sup>4</sup> Delving into which particular regional differences in mean economic activity rates are behind this result, we find that AFR stands out in most pairwise comparisons between regions. Specifically, the evidence suggests that the mean economic activity rate for AFR is larger the corresponding statistics for LAC, MNA, and EAP (see Table 3 for results from Bonferroni multiple comparison tests).<sup>5</sup>

# _Economic activity rates by gender_

First, we find that, in general, boys are much more likely to be economically active than girls. In approximately 85 percent of the sample (or in 55 out of the 65 countries), the economic activity rates for boys exceed those of girls (see Figure 2).6 Interestingly, the few country cases where the economic activity rates of girls exceed those of boys are not scattered at random but are instead concentrated in certain regions. We find that 7 out of the 10 cases are in AFR, while no cases are present in EAP, ECA, or LAC (see Table 4). Second, the mean economic activity rate among boys is 23.9 percent while the corresponding rate among girls is 18.9 percent. The difference in these means is statistically significant.7 In examining gender disparities in child economic activity rates by region, measured either in terms of _mean difference_ in child economic activity rates between genders or the gender _difference in mean_ child economic activity rates, we find differences in both the magnitude and direction of gender disparities across regions (see Table 5). LAC appears to have the highest gender disparity in child economic activity rates—across both measures, we obtain an identical estimate of 7.2 percentage points in favor of boys. On the other hand, across both measures, MNA appears to be the only region where the gender disparity in child economic activity rates is

> 4 A test of the equality of log mean economic activity rates between regions yielded a _F_ -statistic of 8.78 with a _p_ - value of 0.0000.

> 5 We also conducted Scheffe and Sidak multiple comparison tests.  The results from these two test adjustment methods were in agreement with the Bonferroni adjustment.

> 6 The exceptions are Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Malawi, Nepal, Comoros, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Yemen.

> 7 A test of the equality of mean log economic activity rates between genders yielded a _F_ -statistic of 5.59 with a _p_ - value of 0.020.

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