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Intermittent child employment and its implications for estimates of child labour
Author(s) -
LEVISON Deborah,
HOEK Jasper,
LAM David,
DURYEA Suzanne
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
international labour review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.433
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1564-913X
pISSN - 0020-7780
DOI - 10.1111/j.1564-913x.2007.00014.x
Subject(s) - demographic economics , child labour , labour economics , intermittency , working hours , work (physics) , economics , longitudinal data , longitudinal study , psychology , demography , medicine , geography , sociology , engineering , meteorology , mechanical engineering , turbulence , pathology
Using longitudinal data from urban Brazil, the authors track the employment patterns of thousands of children aged 10‐16 during four months of their lives in the 1980s and 1990s. The proportion of children who work at some point during a four‐month period is substantially higher than the fraction observed working in any single month. The authors calculate an intermittency multiplier to summarize the difference between employment rates in one reference week vs. four reference weeks over a four‐month period. They conclude that intermittent employment is a crucial characteristic of child labour which must be recognized to capture levels of child employment adequately and identify child workers.