An economic view on health and child labour in Brazil / Um olhar econômico sobre a saúde e o trabalho infantil no Brasil

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

The aim of this dissertation is to identify the causal relation between child labour and health. Understanding this relation can bring more resources to fight against child labour as well as to allow the responsible to readjust policies in order to recover children’s health stock where eradication of child labour was not abolished yet. The analysis utilized the PNAD, a Brazilian household survey, from 1998 and 2003. The econometric modeling was based on the pseudo-panel approach. The results of the research were reliable to those in national and international literature of child labour and health. Four models were used to access the impact of child labour on health. Each model represents a different way to analyze labour. The first model made use of the variable that indicates whether the child work or not. It was observed that any kind of labour has a negative impact on their health. The second model analysed the children working hours. The results show that the more they work, the less healthy they become. The third model takes into account the type of work a child does – hazardous or not. The impact of hazardous work on the child’s health is more negative than the impact obtained on the first model. The last model analyzed child labour in different work fields and it showed that children who work in commerce and in the service sector presented a worst health status. However, the same is not true for the ones who work in agriculture. This shows that families from rural areas have a bigger ability to recover their children’s health stock, probably due to the work environment where children, in general, work near to the parents. On the other hand, those people who live in rural areas could support or consider normal some kinds of disease. The government intervention in rural areas has to be different from the one implemented on the urban area to mitigate the impact of child labour on health. Other policies to increase children’s health stock should run in parallel with those of child labour and poor health alleviation, such as improvement of the access to the health system, drugs policies, maternal health education program etc.

ASSUNTO(S)

child development econometrics child health child labour educação em saúde bem-estar da criança econometria child well-being saúde da criança capital humano desenvolvimento infantil human capital education on health trabalho de menor

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