Does Distance Matter? Proximity to Exporting Firms on Child Labour and Education Rates: Evidence from Bangladesh

Child labour continues to be a major concern in developing countries. One of the main issues with child labour is that it interferes with a child's right to education as the majority of child labourers' do not attend school due to employment. In this study, we consider the issue in Bangladesh where education rates have recently stagnated despite economic growth, which typically leads to an increase of education rates. The Bangladeshi economy is driven by its export sector, which relies on low-cost labour and it is plausible that children are not attending school in order to work. To test the claim, we combine novel spatial data on the locations over 11,000 exporting firms with over 95,000 similarly geo-located child survey responses from three waves of the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Using matching techniques, we show that, when controlling for external factors, such as household income, students living closer to an exporting firm are more likely to report work and less likely to report attending school, providing evidence to suggest that the exporting sector may be influencing macro trends in Bangladesh school attendance.