classified as economically active if the child performs such work for at least one hour in a stipulated reference week during the regular school year.

Child labor as defined by the ILO comprises of (i) all children between 5-11 years of age who are economically active, (ii) children between 12-14 years of age who work in an economic activity for 14 or more hours per week, and (iii) children between 12-17 years of age who work in an economic activity that is classified as belonging to the “worst forms of child labor.” The “worst forms of child labor” as established by ILO Convention No. 182 enacted in 1999, comprises of (i) slavery or economic activity in slave-like conditions, (ii) prostitution or pornography, (iii) illicit activities such as drug production and trafficking, and (iv) economic activities that are likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of the child. The ILO classifies the first three types as “unconditional worst forms of child labor.” It is important to be aware that domestic work performed by children in their _own_ households, irrespective of the specific characteristics of such work (e.g., the number of hours or the level of hardship), is considered a non-economic activity and hence children who perform such work exclusively are not classified as child workers, that is, they are not counted among the economically active. Basu and Tzannatos (2003), among others, have argued that the exclusion of own-household domestic work from the set of work activities that constitute child work leads to the more serious undercounting of girls relative to boys among child workers. Insofar as girls are disproportionately found among children engaged in own-household domestic work exclusively, this will certainly be the case. Furthermore, it may very well be that counting children engaged in own-household domestic work among the economically active eliminates the male-bias in the gender gap found in economic activity rates. However, due to the acute sparsity of data on children’s participation in non-economic activities across countries, this claim is not, at least at present, verifiable. Regardless, the question of whether to include ownhousehold domestic work under the rubric of economic activity and hence in the positive determination of child work remains. We will however not comment on this issue here.

UNICEF Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS) has included measures of domestic activities in its concept of child labor. According to this definition, a child is involved in child labor under the following classification: (i) children 5-11 years of age who did at least one hour of economic activity or at least 28 hours of domestic work during the week preceding the survey, and (ii) children 12-14 years of age who did at least 14 hours of economic activity or at least 28 hours domestic work during the week preceding the survey. The hour thresholds for both economic and domestic work reflect the level of children activity beyond which work is judged to adverse implication on children human capital and social development.

Most measures used to estimate child labor are based on cross sectional surveys which have the advantage of providing information for a large set of children. They capture a snapshot of children’s work experience based on a reference week but are not designed to measure intermittent work. A reference period of one week is too short because it is unable to take account of the phenomenon of frequent labor force entry and exit of children. In fact, a longer reference period that can capture part of the frequent transitions in and out of work is more appropriate to produce accurate estimates of child labor. At the same time, the greater the prevalence of intermittency, the greater is the undercount of total child workers. According to 3