the Understanding Children’s Work (UCW) project<sup>6</sup> (in international partner organizations and academic institutions) to obtain information on further relevant impact evaluations. We make use of the UCW inventory and present the most relevant results of all peer-reviewed papers. Non-reviewed studies were considered if they apply a plausible and rigorous strategy to identify the impact of the program on child labor.<sup>7</sup> The papers we discuss include randomized trials as well as regression discontinuity designs, natural experiments, and propensity score matching studies.<sup>8</sup> Papers that do not explicitly evaluate the impacts of the intervention on child labor outcomes were excluded.

As mentioned in the previous section, the concepts used to categorize children’s work and child labor are at times inconsistent in published statistics and research reports. Similarly, there is substantial variation in the productive activities covered by the impact evaluations discussed in this review. To achieve consistency, our discussion primarily focuses on impact estimates for children’s participation in economic activities conducted for pay and/or for the household (i.e. excluding household chores) and discuss, when available, the program impacts for different categories of economic activities or household chores. We present the impact on the extensive margin of child labor (as this is the outcome that most studies examine) and on the intensive margin of child labor. We focus on children aged 6 – 14 years, the cut-off is set as the minimum working legal age set in most countries. We refer the reader to the extensive literature on youth labor programs, defined as the population aged 15 to 24 (see Behrman 1999, Card et al. 2015, Blattman and Ralston 2015, among others).

Our filters produce a final sample of 31 evaluations. It should be noted that impact evaluations around child labor tend to suffer from two limitations: (i) seldom is child labor the main outcome of interest of labor and social protections programs and (ii) the interventions for which they are developed are not necessarily selected according to a consistent knowledge generating strategy. What we know about what works in addressing child labor based on impact evaluations is defined by these limitations.

# **3. Review of the Evidence**

This section provides a systematic review of the evidence on different policy interventions grouped into five areas relevant for child labor: labor-oriented programs, credit and microfinance, cash transfers, schooling incentives (vouchers, food programs), and targeted child labor programs. This review is based on 31 high-quality studies conducted until the end of 2015.

> 6 The UCW project is an inter-agency research cooperation initiative involving the (ILO), UNICEF and the World Bank. Through a variety of research activities, the UCW project supports the partner agencies in improving statistical information on the child labor phenomenon in its various dimensions – its nature and extent, its causes and consequences, and what policy approaches are most effective in addressing it.

> 7 Sometimes doubts arise regarding the strategy used to deal with endogenous program placement and selfselection in both peer reviewed and non-reviewed papers. In those cases, we discuss these doubts in the text.

> 8 For readers requiring more background, we recommend the following references: Duflo, Glennerster, and Kremer (2008), Gertler et al. (2011) and Khandker, Koolwal, and Samad (2010).

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