_Relationship between the share of children working and the share of children working only_ In examining the relationship between the share of children working (which we had previously referred to as the child economic activity rate) and the share of children working _and_ not attending school, we find a positive relationship between the two variables, suggesting that countries with higher rates of children working also have higher rates of children working _and_ not attending school (see Figure 5). As evidence of the strength of the linear association between the two variables, we estimate a correlation coefficient of 0.85. Further examining the relationship between the two variables separately by gender, we find that the correlation coefficient is slightly larger among girls than among boys (0.86 vs. 0.84). However, we cannot reject that null hypothesis of equality of correlation coefficients between genders at standard significance levels.

_Child labor rates by region_ Child labor statistics are available for 59 of the 65 countries in our sample. As mentioned before, the definition of child labor proposed by the ILO is more stringent than their definition of child economic activity; the child labor definition takes into account weekly hours of work and the type of work activity in relation to the child’s age. Specifically, the ILO defines the child as being engaged in child labor if (i) the child is between 5-11 years of age and is economically active, or (ii) the child is between 12-14 years of age and works in an economic activity for 14 or more hours per week.

Based on the above child labor definition, across the 59 countries for which we have child labor information, the child labor rate among 7-14 year olds is 12.4 percent, that is, roughly 1 in 8 children are engaged in child labor (see Table 11). This statistic is roughly 4.8 percentage points (or 51 percent) lower than the mean economic activity rate for the equivalent sample. Disaggregating the sample by region, we find, as expected, that the rank ordering of regions with respect to child labor rates are consistent with the rank ordering of regions with respect to child economic activity rates. Specifically, we find that AFR has the highest child labor rate, with roughly 1 in 5 children engaged in child labor, while LAC and MNA have the lowest child labor rates, with roughly 1 in 16 children engaged in child labor (see Table 11 and Figure 6).

As mentioned above, examining the percent difference between the child economic activity rate and the child labor rate, we find that, for the sample as a whole, the mean child labor rate is roughly one-half of the mean child economic activity rate. As Figure 7 shows, the percent gap appears to be larger in AFR than in other regions, though the influence of country outliers potentially matters.

The cross-country variation in child labor rates, both for the sample as a whole as well as in each of the region samples, is typically higher the equivalent statistics with respect to child economic activity rates. For example, for the sample as a whole, we estimate a standard deviation of 11.7 percentage points, yielding a coefficient of variation of 94.4 percent. Disaggregating the sample by region, we find that the coefficient of variation is highest in EAP and lowest in SAR.

Undertaking a one-way analysis of variance, we find that roughly 27 percent of the variation in child labor rates across countries is attributable to between-region variation, while the remaining 73 percent is attributable to within-region variation. This finding is broadly consistent with the finding from the analogous decomposition from the total cross-country variation in economic 7