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Table 1
Percentage of Children Age 1014 in Labor Force in Selected Countries
Country
Bangladesh
26.5
Brazil
13.4
China
5.5
Costa Rica
3.3
Dominican Republic
11.5
El Salvador
10.3
Haiti
21.4
Honduras
5.5
India
10.7
Indonesia
6.8
Burma
22.0
Nicaragua
8.9
Thailand
10.0
Figure 1
Percent of Economically Active Children Employed by Sector
Agriculture
90
Percentage Employed
71.3
62.1
20
40.3
34.1
12.7
10
35.3
25.8
24.9
23.3
15.4
8.2
4.6
66.4
50.5
49
50
40
62.5
57.5
55.1
60
30
Manufacturing
79.2
80
70
Services
18.5
9.5
9.8
12.9
9.4
14.2
12
7.3
Figure 2
Percent of Children Age 10-14 in Labor Force by Country Income Quintile
35%
31.04%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
7.35%
4.58%
5%
0%
0.01%
0.16%
> $24K
$11K$24K
$6K$11K
$2K$6K
$600$2K
Income
7. The World Bank database does not include data for Vietnam,
but Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, Child Labor in the
Global Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1
(Winter 2005): 204, report that 92 percent of children working in
Vietnam in 1998 worked in agriculture.
8. Kebebew Asshagrie, Statistics on Working Children and
Hazardous Child Labour in Brief, Geneva: International Labor
Organization (1997).
9. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that
18 percent of children aged 5 to 14 are economically active
worldwide. Of these, it estimates that 94 percent of them are in
low-income countries, and only 2 percent are in what it classifies
as developed countries. ILO, Every Child Counts: New Global
Estimates on Child Labour, Geneva: ILO (2002).
10. International Labor Organization, Summary of the
Results of the Child and Adolescent Labour Survey in
Costa Rica, Geneva: ILO (2002), http://www.ilo.org/ipec/
ChildlabourstatisticsSIMPOC/Questionnairessurveysandreports/
lang--en/index.htm.
11. The remainder of this paragraph and the next draws on
research found in Joshua C. Hall and Peter T. Leeson, Good for
the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards
and Comparative Development, Journal of Labor Research 28,
no. 4 (September 2007): 65876.
12. Robert Whaples, Child Labor in the United States, in
EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. R. Whaples, retrieved from http://
eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.childlabor.
13. Samuel Lindsay, Child Labor in the United States,
American Economic Association 8, (February 1907): 256259.
14. Carolyn Moehling, State Child Labor Laws and the Decline
in Child Labor, Explorations in Economic History 36, no. 1
(1999): 72105.
15. Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, Mass Secondary Schooling
and the State: The Role of State Compulsion and the High
School Movement, NBER Working Paper No. 10075 (2003).
16. France and Prussia both had earlier laws prohibiting child
labor, but they were not enforceable. See Hall and Leeson (2007).
17. Edmonds and Pavcnik, (2005): 210.