evidence against such universal theories and aims to expand the other strand of literature that questions the high importance of poverty.<sup>4</sup> Results presented here suggest that increases in household wealth in Ghana (which have largely been accrued by those in services and manufacturing) will not inevitably result in significant reductions in child labor, unless such increases are a result of other, more important influencers including a reduction in agricultural dependency and thus reduced levels of social acceptance of child labor and greater returns to rural schooling. This has important implications on the typical way most economists view and try to mitigate child labor, with the paper outlining a different set of needed policy responses.

This paper thus has several contributions to the existing child labor literature. It assesses a wider range of potential sources of child labor simultaneously than currently in individual papers in the literature that often only focus on a specific issue, allowing here for a broader understanding of the importance of potential structural, geographic, monetary, cultural, seasonal, and school-supply factors, as well as gender and other demographic traits in a single paper. It broadens the standard analytical approach by applying quantitative and qualitative methods and thereby provides some new insight into the critical role of social norms in influencing the demand for child labor especially in family farming, which is an area not well understood in child labor research that typically only applies survey data. It identifies potential effects that influence some subgroups but not others by conducting disaggregated analysis, for example, on child laborers in and outside of household farming, across different seasons of the year and for a number of other subgroups. In contrast, most existing studies pool data and neglect the heterogeneity of child laborers which reduces the usefulness of results for policy makers. It also offers some insight into why levels of child labor can stagnate in growing economies or poverty-reducing economies like Ghana.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the data sources. Section 3 presents the basic descriptive household survey results, enriched by the results from interviews conducted in Ghana in 2010. Section 4 describes the statistical model, outlines its methodological limitations and illustrates the multivariate regression results, providing some insight into the importance of a number of potential sources of child labor beyond monetary poverty. In response to the results, section 5 discusses what combination of programs and policy reforms in the short- and longer-term is likely to help mitigate harmful child labor that is defined as conflicting with children’s education and thus later opportunities. Section 6 concludes, while outlining some theoretical and methodological limitations facing economic analyses. In particular, the primary objective guiding this paper is to try and identify which potential constraints and enabling factors beyond monetary poverty are important—i.e. to empirically test the ‘luxury axiom’ in the agrarian economy of Ghana—and thereby to identify which policies may be best in mitigating harmful child labor in the country. Answers to these questions are critical for policy planners and makers.

# **2. Data sources**

This paper is based on research carried out in Ghana between 2010 and 2011, employing household survey data together with qualitative interviews and fieldwork trips. This Q- squared approach allows for a broader and more nuanced understanding of multiple potential sources of child labor.

> 4 For example: Barros _et al._ 1994; Rogers and Swinnerton 2004.

3