Dynamics of Child Labor: Labor-Force Entry and Exit in Urban Brazil

Relatively little is known about the dynamics of children’s labor-force work, although child labor has been a subject of research and policy discussion since the days of Europe’s Industrial Revolution (Edmonds, 2008). Small case studies from Latin America and elsewhere suggest that children tend to move in and out of different jobs, and in and out of the labor force, to a much greater extent than do adults. Still, policy discussions of child labor often seem to have an underlying unstated assumption that most children work long hours in jobs that, like those of adults, continue steadily from day-to-day and from week-to-week. Even if the jobs change, children are imagined to find other jobs immediately, because of the pressing needs generated by poverty. In this chapter, we report the results of an analysis of nearly twenty years of panel data for metropolitan Brazil, showing that employed children frequently stop work, then start working again—a phenomenon we call “intermittent employment.” Children’s tendency to work intermittently is reflected by differential employment levels, depending on the time interval used, and by monthly employment entry and exit rates. We use estimates of entry and exit rates and how they change over time to better understand the downward trend in employment levels that we document.