The direct and indirect impact of child labor on educational achievement: evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

This study explores the direct and indirect impact of child work on educational achievement of children at the age from 11 to 20 across rural and urban areas in Vietnam, using the data of Young Lives Round 4 complemented in 2013. Given the characteristics of individual, household and schooling which are controlled in estimation, the results indicate that there is negative relationship between hours worked and math scores of children, but the impact in the rural areas is different from that in the urban. In urban, exhaustion while working or doing other activities besides learning is responsible for weak performance in schools. Meanwhile, school dropouts and delays because of working is the main reason of low educational outcomes of children in rural. Further, schooling attributes contribute to the increase in math scores of children, especially those in rural, raising the necessities of improving qualities of education in those regions. This study also uses a set of factors including income earned from crops, household shocks, and community – level rice price as instruments of hours worked variable. But after Hausman examination, the Ordinal Least Square (OLS) results are preferred due to weak instruments.