Suchergebnisse

An abolitionist approach to children's work bans all work; a regulatory approach bans harmful work and regulates other work. I argue for a regulatory approach, using the "least restrictive alternative" test commonly applied in law. I contend, however, that definitions of harmful work must appropriately specific to local contexts and informed by the views of working children. I support this with a case study of a village in Ethiopia, where the current abolitionist approach is overly restrictive. However, a regulatory approach based on international definitions of harmful work would probably not protect children against some harmful work. Children and their parents have a better understanding of which work is harmful, so local definitions ought to be the basis of regulatory legislation.

Many schools in developing countries have four-hour school days and teach two groups of children each day. Governments are considering lengthening the school day, at great expense, to improve school quality. Advocates of the shift system argue the reform is unnecessary, as evidence from developed countries suggests increasing instructional time only improves achievement scores by small amounts. This paper is the first study of the effect of a large increase in instructional time in a low-income country. In 2005, the Ethiopian federal government directed school districts to abolish teaching in shifts and to lengthen the school day from four to six hours. Districts implemented the reform at different times, creating exogenous variation in instructional time. I use a difference-in-difference specification controlling for time-invariant unobservables at school level on a unique longitudinal dataset. For 8-year-old children, a longer school day improved writing and mathematics scores, but had no significant effect on reading. However, effects are larger among better-off children: children who are not stunted, children from richer households, and children in urban schools. The exception is that the reform has larger positive effects on girls than boys. The reform thus improves achievement on average, but may exacerbate gaps between wealthier and poorer children.

Poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high. One possible explanation is that they have low aspirations and form mental models of their future opportunities which ignore some options for investment. This paper reports on a field experiment to test this hypothesis in rural Ethiopia. Individuals were randomly invited to watch documentaries about people from similar communities who had succeeded in agriculture or business, without help from government or NGOs. A placebo group watched an Ethiopian entertainment programme and a control group were simply surveyed. In addition, the number of people invited was varied by village to assess the importance of peer effects in formation of aspirations. Six months after screening, aspirations had improved among treated individuals and did not change in the placebo or control groups. Treatment effects were larger for those with higher pre-treatment aspirations. We also find treatment effects on savings, use of credit, children's school enrolment and spending on children's schooling, suggesting that changes in aspirations can translate into changes in a range of forward-looking behaviours. There are also treatment effects on measures from psychology and sociology, including locus of control, which theory predicts should behave in similar ways to aspirations. Most effects are robust to corrections for multiple testing. Peer effects results in further impact on educational spending and induce more work and less leisure. The result that a one-hour documentary shown six months earlier induces actual behavioural change suggests a challenging, promising avenue for further research and poverty-related interventions.