The Impacts of International Remittances on Child Labor and Household Welfare

This paper examines the impacts of international remittances on child labor and household welfare by presenting evidence from Turkey. Remittances by alleviating resource constraints may improve household welfare and help reduce labor supply of children in exchange of accumulating more schooling. The results find significant declines in propensities of wage work and unpaid family work for girls and boys of ages 15-to-19 in remittance receiving households, respectively. Remittances improve household welfare by significantly reducing the chances of recipient households living under the poverty line. However, the positive effect of remittances vanishes when the focus is on extreme poverty. This finding implies that migration is costly and families with very low incomes cannot afford migration, thereby cannot benefit from the benefits of migration, remittances. Thus, policies that facilitate migration especially for low-income families may help improve standards of living of these households and increase educational attainment of their children