An Analysis of Parents' Strategies of Child Labour and Education in Developing Countries

This paper sheds light on the trade-off between child labour and education in developing countries. We show there are different strategies of education that parents can adopt to enhance children's wellbeing. We distinguish four categories of education: formal education, vocational training, non-formal education and informal education, implying that child labour and education analysis is no more binary. Hence, these educations are suitable for different categories of households (the richer of the poor and the poorer of the rich). These households make their decision about education and child labour according to the adult labour market and their income. In an environment characterised by a high level of youth unemployement these households prefer investing in informal education. We specify explicitly that we make a commitment to do not proceed to any kind of tests. Our critical point of view is to assert that education, as such, could not be summed up to a simple binary arbitration. On the contrary, we defend a conceptual approach.