Education and Children’s Work: Spain, Latin America, and Developing Countries

We already stressed that the twentieth century has significantly been labeled as the human capital century, specially in North America. In this chapter we focus on Latin America in a more widely comparative perspective with other developing countries and the previous metropolis, Spain. We focus on key aspects of women and child labor market participation levels and education. While in developed regions of Spain the increase of levels of education of women and children was a process that modestly began during the nineteenth century and took place during all the twentieth century, in developing countries and more precisely in Latin America the process of educational reform was slow and began in the twentieth century. Uneducated mothers with low levels of income conceived uneducated children that were soon part of the labor force, particularly in unskilled occupations of the informal sector of the economy. But in the Latin American case there is a trend towards the improvement of women’s and children’s condition during the last third of the twentieth century. The increase of levels of education of women brought with it the decline of levels of participation of children and the improvement of demographic conditions (infant mortality and fertility) as we already stressed in Chapter 4 .