Peer-reviewed article
Can a Ban on Child Labour Be Self-Enforcing?
Alessandro Cigno ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This is a theoretical economics paper about whether a legal ban on child labour can sustain itself without continued enforcement. It builds on earlier work by Basu and Van (1989), which showed that once only adults work, parents may have no reason to send children back to work. The authors show this result still holds when education is a valuable alternative to child labour. They also consider cases where children work both for their parents and in the labour market, and find that a ban applying only to market work can be effective even where a self-enforcing ban would not be.
Key points
- Earlier work argued that a child labour ban may be self-enforcing once an equilibrium where only adults work is established.
- The original result assumed parents prefer children to do nothing and consume the minimum rather than do a little work and consume more.
- The result also holds when education is a valuable alternative to child labour.
- If children work for parents (unobservable) and in the labour market (observable), a ban can only apply to market work.
- A ban may reduce child labour in that case even where it would not be self-enforcing under the other assumptions.
Limitations
The text is a short abstract of a theoretical model, with no empirical data, specific country or tested intervention, so it cannot show how bans work in practice. The type hint was OTHER and no country was given or stated.
Abstract
A series of articles beginning with Basu and Van (1989) argue that a ban on child labour may be self-enforcing in the sense that, once an equilibrium where only adults work is established, parents may have no incentive to depart from it, and the ban is no longer required. This important result was originally obtained under the assumption that parents would rather see their children do nothing and consume the minimum necessary to survive, than do even a very small amount of work and consume more. We show that it holds also if education is a valuable alternative to child labour, and the disutility of the latter can be compensated by the utility of present consumption or future earning capacity. If children work for their parents as well as in the labour market, however, and the second type of work is observable by the policy maker, but the first is not, a ban can only apply to market work. Paradoxically, a child labour ban may be effective in reducing child labour under such circumstances if it would not be self- enforcing under the alternative ones.