# **I.  Introduction**

By most indications, child labor appears to be a phenomenon of major proportions in the developing world. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that around 190 million children between 5-14 years of age were economically active in 2004 (ILO 2006).<sup>1</sup> This figure represents slightly less than 16 percent of all children in this age group.

The extent of the phenomenon across the developing world in general and in certain regions and countries in particular, as well as concerns that child labor may largely be an undesirable economic or social outcome, have motivated a substantial amount of research into understanding the causes and effects of child labor as well as the effects of changing economic conditions and various policy and project interventions designed to address the issue.

The aim of this study is two-fold. First, based on summary data at the country-level for an unusually large set of developing countries originally obtained from household sample surveys conducted between 1993 and 2003, we construct a detailed profile of child economic activity and child labor, attempting, wherever the data permit, to identify similarities and differences across regions and between genders. Second, we link our country-level data on child economic activity and child labor to country-level indicators of the state of economic and social development in the same time period in order to (1) ascertain if cross-country correlations previously identified in the literature are found in our data and (2) illumine other possible correlations that may exist. As part of this exercise, we examine one important relationship that has thus far not been directly investigated in the literature, namely, the cross-country correlation between child labor, agriculture and poverty.

In the next section, we describe the definition of children’s economic activity and child labor. Section III describes the cross section patterns, the sectoral and gender distribution of children’s work. Section IV briefly summarizes the evidence on the consequences of child labor on human capital accumulation. Section V presents evidence on the relationship between child labor, income constraints and the structure of the economy measured by the share of the agriculture sector. We conclude in section IV.

# **II.  Measuring Child Labor: Definitions and pitfalls**

There is no universally agreed upon measure of child labor. Definitions of the relevant age of the child and the type of work vary across studies and surveys.<sup>2</sup> Three basic categories are identified: economic activity, child labor, and hazardous work. Severe limitations characterize these indicators. They are hard to measure, exclude important activities that children undertake in own household (chores), and are subject to important seasonal variations.

The data allows us to examine child economic activity and child labor. Child economic activity is defined as all paid work and certain forms of unpaid work (e.g _._ , unpaid work in ownhousehold enterprises). In line with the international definition of employment, the child is

> 1 The 29 countries were selected with probability proportional to size from a sample of countries stratified on the basis of geographic region and the country’s child population (5-17 years of age) size.  Several adjustments were made to harmonize the child work data across different dimensions.  These adjustments are delineated in ILO 2002. 2 The ICLS 2008 is expected to agree on a definition of child labor.

2