@article{b4eee5fd541e44ada1f586feeedc9358,
title = "Community-level health programs and child labor: evidence from Ethiopia",
abstract = "Many developing countries have adopted community-based primary health-care programs. A vital component of these programs is health literacy, which teaches households to avoid physical harm. Child labor can often result in physical harm through injury. Our hypothesis is that health literacy programs make households aware of previously unknown costs of child labor (i.e., risks of injury), resulting in a reallocation of labor away from children. Using Ethiopian data, we investigate if exposure to a community-level health program delivered by Health Extension Workers (HEWs) lowers child labor. We use panel data comprising 5587 observations from 2255 children over four waves of the Young Lives Project. These data are combined with administrative regional-level data on HEWs over the 2006–2016 period. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the deployment of HEWs across regions and time to investigate a plausibly exogenous effect on child labor. We provide evidence that supports our hypothesis. We posit that the mechanism behind our result is likely behavioral change, and rule out several other potential channels, including public safety net programs and the effect of HEWs on education. Our results point to the role that health programs can play in the fight against child labor.",
keywords = "child labor, community health, developing countries, Ethiopia, health extension program",
author = "Alberto Posso and {De Silva Perera}, Udeni and Ankita Mishra",
note = "Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the editor, Katharina Hauck, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The authors also wish to thank Jo En Yap, Simon Feeny, and Ahmed Skali and participants at the Centre for International Development Workshop on Development Studies and the EADI ISS Conference (2021) for their valuable comments and suggestions. The data used in this publication come from Young Lives, a 15‐year study of the changing nature of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam ( www.younglives.org.uk ). Young Lives is funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed here are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those of Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID or other funders. Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the editor, Katharina Hauck, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The authors also wish to thank Jo En Yap, Simon Feeny, and Ahmed Skali and participants at the Centre for International Development Workshop on Development Studies and the EADI ISS Conference (2021) for their valuable comments and suggestions. The data used in this publication come from Young Lives, a 15-year study of the changing nature of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam (www.younglives.org.uk). Young Lives is funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed here are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those of Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID or other funders. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.",
year = "2021",
month = dec,
doi = "10.1002/hec.4429",
language = "English",
volume = "30",
pages = "2995--3015",
journal = "Health Economics",
issn = "1057-9230",
publisher = "John Wiley & Sons",
number = "12",
}
