The lack of decent work opportunities for youth is a growing concern worldwide. According to ILO estimates, of the world's estimated 207 million unemployed people in 2009, nearly 40 percent were between 15 and 24 years of age. In many countries, this grim unemployment picture is further...

The study addresses the comparability of child labour estimates produced by different common household survey instruments. This question has important implications for credibility of published estimates of child labour, and for the reliability of current survey instruments as tools for...

This paper aims to begin to fill in the gap about the possible role of school quality in affecting household decisions relative to children’s work and school attendance. While from a theoretical point of view, we would expect school quality to be an important determinant of household...

The study assesses trends in children’s involvement in employment and schooling in Andhra Pradesh over the eleven-year period from 1994 to 2005. Considerable progress was made in getting children out of employment and into school over this 11-year period: children’s involvement in employment...

The paper analyzes the effect of different shocks on household decisions concerning children’s involvement in work and school in rural Cambodia. We assess the differential impact of three different types of shocks using propensity score matching and double difference estimates extended to the...

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and ILO Convention No. 182, two of the main international legal instruments relating to child labour, both recognise children’s right to be protected from forms of work that adversely affect their health and development, regardless of whether this...

Since the mid-1990s, the UNICEF Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey (MICS) programme has enabled many developing countries to produce statistically sound and internationally comparable estimates of a range of indicators in the areas of health, education and child protection. The current paper...

This study aimed at assessing skills deficits in developing country contexts on the basis of firm data from World Bank Enterprise Surveys. A precise definition of skills deficit was used – employers’ perceptions of inadequate workforce educational levels as a relative and absolute constraint...

A large proportion of Ivorian children must grow up in the absence of one or both birth parents. In all, 13 percent of children aged 0-14 years of age are orphans, the second highest orphan rate in the West Africa region. There is also a large group of children, accounting for about 15 percent...

The strong link between water access and child health is well-documented. Much less is known about how water access affects children's activity patterns. Empirical evidence presented in this paper indicates that providing households with ready water access makes it much more likely that the...