Child Labor and the Education of a Society
49 Pages Posted: 21 Aug 2001
Date Written: August 2001
Abstract
We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work full-time and no human capital accumulation takes place, with continuous growth at an asymptotically steady rate as an alternative. We show that a society can escape from the poverty trap into a condition of continuous growth through a program of taxes and transfers. Temporary inequality is a necessary condition to escape in finite time, but long-run inequalities are avoidable provided sufficiently heavy, but temporary taxes can be imposed on the better-off. Programs aiming simply at high attendance rates in the present can be strongly non-optimal.
Keywords: Child Labor, Growth and Inequality, Education, Human Capital, Redistributive Policies, Poverty Traps
JEL Classification: H2, I2, O1, O41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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