Peer-reviewed article
The Role of Land Wealth on Child Labour in Vietnam
Yin Li Toh ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines whether land wealth, rather than just income poverty, drives child labour in Vietnam. It builds on research showing a 'wealth paradox' where greater land ownership increases child labour in some agrarian societies, contrary to expectations. The study is motivated by Vietnam's 1993 Land Law, which allowed households to own land as wealth, and tests whether this paradox applies in Vietnam's context.
Key points
- Previous studies in Ghana, Pakistan, and Burkina Faso found that larger land holdings are associated with higher child labour rates
- Income poverty has traditionally been considered the main cause of child labour, but recent evidence contradicts this
- Labour market imperfections may create an inverse-U shaped relationship between land size and child labour
- In 1990s Vietnam, poverty reduction explained up to 80% of child labour decline, and rice price increases explained nearly half of the decline
- Vietnam's 1993 Land Law redistributed land rights and enabled households to own land as stored wealth, creating conditions for the wealth paradox to emerge
Limitations
The document is an abstract or introduction that does not present the study's actual findings, methodology, or results. Therefore, we cannot assess whether the wealth paradox hypothesis is supported or what the implications are for Vietnam.
Abstract
The economics literature generally considers income poverty to be the main cause of child labour.However, recent papers have cast doubt on this, showing evidence that greater land wealth leads to higher child labour.Bhalotra and Heady (World Bank Economic Review, 2003) showed that land size has a positive effect on child labour in Ghana and Pakistan.Supporting evidence has also been found in Burkina Faso (Dumas, Oxford Economic Papers, 2007).Land in agrarian societies is considered a source of wealth and thus, this effect is labeled as the wealth paradox.Basu et al., (Journal of Development Economics, 2010) considered labour market imperfections in their theoretical model, and suggested an inverse-U shaped relationship between land size and child labour.It is argued that labour market imperfections are significant enough to hinder the expected negative relationship between household wealth and child labour.This wealth paradox has motivated research studying the impact of household-owned land on child labour in Vietnam, as research on this area in Southeast Asia is scarce.In the context from Vietnam, many papers using data from the 1990s find an association between poverty and child labour.Edmonds (The Journal of Human Resources, 2005) reported that per capita expenditure increases across households that moved out of poverty can explain up to 80% of the decline in child labour.Additionally, increases in rice prices during the 1990s through trade liberalisation caused nearly half of the child labour decline in Vietnam (Edmonds and Pavcnik, Journal of International Economics, 2004).Even though empirical evidence supports the poverty hypothesis for child labour in Vietnam, this paper hypothesizes that the wealth paradox of child labour is present in Vietnam post-1993.Vietnam introduced the 1993 Land Law that redistributed land rights, and subsequently allowed households to own land as assets and stored wealth.Could the