Peer-reviewed article

Does distance matter? Firm proximity, child labour and education

Aubrey Keeler Saunders, Samuel Rueckert Brazys · 11 Jun 2025

Abstract

Child labour continues to be a major concern in developing countries, especially as continuously employed child labourers will have extreme difficulty attending school. In this study, we consider the issue in Bangladesh where education rates have recently stagnated despite economic growth. The Bangladeshi economy is driven by its export sector, which relies on low-cost labour that may keep children from school. To test the claim, we combine novel spatial data on the locations of over 11,000 exporting firms with over 95,000 similarly geo-located child survey responses from three waves of the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Using matching techniques, we show that, when controlling for external factors, such as household income, students living closer to an exporting firm are more likely to report work and less likely to report attending school, providing evidence to suggest that the exporting sector may be influencing macro trends in Bangladesh school attendance.