| This article examines the relationship between illegal child labor and levels of school attendance. I study the effects of government transparency, government expenditure on education, and gender parity on both child labor and school attendance.; Introduction. The United Nations dedicated 1979 as "The Year of the Child," prompting an increase in international concern regarding children's rights (Bessell, 1999 pp.360). Since then, important international agreements, including the seminal UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), enacted in 1990, have provided the impetus for further study on the issue by international organizations and academics alike (UNCRC, 1990). Most international laws dealing with children focus, in part, on child labor. As such, many studies have been conducted and a great deal of literature has been written on child labor. Fundamental to past research and literature has been examining the causal effects of social and political variables on the issue of child labor (Bessell, 1999; Canagarajah and Nielsen, 2001; Diller and Levy, 1997, Glut, 1995; Human Rights Watch, 1996; Human Rights Watch 2003). It is these variables I wish to study further, specifically examining their effect on the relationship between child labor and education. In examining the relationship between labor and education, I focus on the effect of three specific causal variables on this relationship: gender parity, government transparency, and government expenditure on education. |
