School performance and child paid work: evidence from West Bank schools

ABSTRACT

The current study aims to investigate the impact of academic achievement on child labor. The study utilizes survey data collected from Palestinian children in the primary grades (5th–9th) in West Bank schools. The results show that increasing a child’s academic achievement is significantly associated with decreasing the probability of a child’s paid work in the following period. Our findings varied among children according to their gender, age, and locality type. Our analyses are subject to different specifications, including two-stage least squares (2SLS) to account for potential endogeneity. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of dropping out of school is low for students with poor school outcomes. Further analysis indicates the role of the family-supportive environment as a mediator between academic success and child labor-supply decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic achievement; child labor
• West Bank

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• D15
• I21
• J13
• I12

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The analysis presented in this paper is part of the project “Determinants of Cognitive Development in Deprived Environments: Evidence from the West Bank” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number JU 2769/2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more details see: https://www.unicef.org/protection/child-labour.

2 Noting that some sources indicate more severe rates of child labor from UNICEF, see: https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/child-labor-facts-and-statisticsl.

3 See ‘What is Child Labour’ section on ILO website at https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--en/index.htm#.

4 For further details, see https://data.unicef.org/sdgs/goal-8-decent-work-economic-growth/#:~:text=As%20this%20relates%20to%20children,of%20child%20labour%20by%202025.

5 UNRWA stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. These schools are designed for Palestinian refugee children and provide free education until 9th grade.

6 This percentage (94.6%) represents Net Enrollment Rate in Basic Education in the West Bank School, which is defined as the total number of students in official enrollment age (6–15 years) regardless of the grade they are enrolled in, expressed as a percentage of the total number of populations with corresponding age group (6–15 years). This percentage slightly varies among males and females’ students, 94.1% vs 96.4%, respectively (PCBS, 2017).

7 According to PCBS (2013), the drop rate in the West Bank primary stage schools during the academic year 2010/2011 was 0.5% for females and 1.2% for males’ students.

8 See amendments to the law in http://muqtafi.birzeit.edu/pg/getleg.asp?id=16500.

9 For more details see: https://www.ilo.org/beirut/media-centre/news/WCMS_510750/lang--en/index.htm.

10 For example, Palestinians in East Jerusalem have better access to the Israeli labor market than their peers in the West Bank. Statistics indicate that 30% of Jerusalemites do not complete their school education (Association of Civil Rights in Israel, 2017). Schools in East Jerusalem (which are entirely under the Israeli occupation municipality) suffer from the phenomenon of school dropouts, which amounted to 38%, and led to an increase in the participation of children under the age of 15 in the labor force (Shtern, 2017).

11 The data was collected as part of the research project entitled Determinants of Cognitive Development in Deprived Environments: Evidence from the West Bank, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number JU 2769/2.

12 The sampling frame includes 436 schools divided as following: 382 governmental schools (160 boys and 222 girls) and 54 UNRWA schools (20 boys and 34 girls). Those 436 schools are the only schools in the West Bank meet the criteria of sample requirement: single-sex schools should contain grades 5–9.

13 For more details about the HBSC survey, see http://www.hbsc.org/.

14 The ILO (2018) defines child labor as ‘work that deprives children (any person under 18) of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and/or mental development.’ In this study, we strictly adopt work for money (paid work) as a definition of child labor, regardless of whether the work was conducted within a child’s household or not or during/out of school time.

15 The data collection process encompassed several components, including: (1) Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) answered by students, (2) a parental background questionnaire (answered by child mother—administered at home), (3) grades (school performance) obtained from school records, (4) standardized cognitive test answered by students, (5) a school principal questionnaire, (6) anthropometric measurements. The current study uses the first three instruments (HBSC, school performance and parental background questionnaire). Also, we merged this data with contextual information obtained from PCBS at the locality level, which represents the smallest administrative geographic unit defined by the PCBS.

16 The standard of living index reflects whether a household owns fixed assets such as a TV, mobile phone, DVD player, air conditioning, or cars, among other belongings.

17 Locality is the smallest geographical administrative unit defined by the PCBS.

18 Area C includes areas in the West Bank that are still under full Israeli military and civil control based on the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian Authority has civil and security control in area A and civil autonomy but no security control in area B (Vishwanath et al., 2014) For more details, see www.btselem.org/topic/Area_c.

19 The Israeli West Bank wall is a separation barrier built by the Israeli government in the West Bank along the 1949 armistice line known as the Green Line (Vishwanath et al., 2014). It divides Palestinian communities, encircles some, and isolates others from their surroundings while separating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank (UNSCO, 2014).

20 The proportion of workers in Israeli is significantly varying between localities (the smallest administrative unit according to PCBS) (Miaari et al., 2014).

21 Adding school fixed effects captures the variation between schools, including school type (public versus UNRWA school). We do not add a school type indicator when we control school fixed effects levels (95 schools remain in our sample with all specifications).

22 The first robustness check was conducted on the entire sample, with the outcome variable taking two values (0/1). By incorporating the reasons for child work as additional explanatory variables, we aimed to explore any potential changes in the coefficient estimates for child work on school performance.

23 The passing grade is 50%. Students who obtain a score lower than 50% in three subjects or fewer are required to sit for a make-up exam; if they fail four subjects or more, they repeat the same grade based on the allowed repetition rate (MoEHE, 2016).

24 While energy drinks are beneficial to consumers in terms of increased alertness, and enhanced mood, they can also have harmful physical consequences, such as impaired central nervous system, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and renal function (Malinauskas et al., 2007).

25 Sugar and caffeine are the main ingredients in energy drinks. Several studies suggest a link between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain (Sabbah et al., 2015).

26 The monotonicity assumption implies there are no ‘defiers,’ the subgroup of the population who always do the opposite of the assignment (Swanson et al., 2015; Marbach & Hangartner, 2020).

27 Table B.1 in the Appendix B shows that there are no significant differences in some observed characteristics between the girls and boys in our sample.

28 The mean and the SD for the two questions are 1.29 (0.73) and1.4 (0.69) respectively.