Centre for International Development, School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Health Econ. 2021 Apr;30(4):876-902. doi: 10.1002/hec.4224. Epub 2021 Feb 8.
Mental health is a neglected health issue in developing countries. We test if mental health issues are particularly likely to occur among some of the most vulnerable children in developing countries: those that work. Despite falling in recent decades, child labor still engages 168 million children across the world. While the negative impacts of child labor on physical health are well documented, the effect of child labor on a child's psychosocial wellbeing has been neglected. We investigate this issue with a new dataset of 947 children aged 12-18 years from 750 households in 20 villages across five districts of Tamil Nadu, India. Our purpose-built survey allows for a holistic approach to the analysis of child wellbeing by accounting for levels of happiness, hope, emotional wellbeing, self-efficacy, fear and stress. We use a variety of econometric approaches, some of which utilize household-level fixed effects and account for differences between working and nonworking siblings. We document a robust, large and negative association between child labor and most measures of psychosocial wellbeing. The results are robust to a battery of exercises, including tests for selection on unobservables, randomization inference, instrumental variable techniques, and falsification exercises.
心理健康是发展中国家被忽视的健康问题。我们检验了心理健康问题是否特别容易出现在发展中国家最脆弱的儿童群体中：那些工作的儿童。尽管童工现象在近几十年来有所减少，但全球仍有 1.68 亿儿童从事童工劳动。虽然童工劳动对身体健康的负面影响已有充分记录，但童工劳动对儿童心理社会福利的影响却被忽视了。我们利用来自印度泰米尔纳德邦五个地区的 20 个村庄的 750 户家庭的 947 名 12-18 岁儿童的新数据集来研究这个问题。我们专门设计的调查允许通过衡量幸福感、希望、情感健康、自我效能感、恐惧和压力等指标，全面分析儿童的幸福感。我们使用了各种计量经济学方法，其中一些方法利用了家庭层面的固定效应，并考虑了工作和非工作兄弟姐妹之间的差异。我们记录了童工与大多数心理社会健康衡量标准之间存在显著、显著且负面的关联。这些结果在一系列检验中具有稳健性，包括对不可观测因素的选择性检验、随机化推断、工具变量技术以及伪证检验。
