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The purpose of this paper is to examine if child labour can have long-term consequences on children’s health status.

To capture this relationship, this paper uses the Brazilian National Household Survey (PNAD) conducted in 1998, 2003 and 2008, structured as a pseudo panel and estimated using a fractional response model.

The results show that child labour is negatively associated with child’s health status, and the longer the hours worked, the worse is the child’s health status. The authors also observe that hazardous labour had a three times higher negative effect on the child’s health and those who worked in service sectors are more prone to having a worse health status.

The study shows that different children’s occupations may have very different impacts on children’s health and indicates that despite the fact that Brazil has a strict law prohibiting child labour, the share of children working is still high and this work has a negative impact on child’s health.

The purpose of this paper is to present evidences on the spillover effects of a cash transfer addressed to poor elders in Brazil.

Using the Brazilian National Households Survey (PNAD) the authors assess the effects of an income transfer to the elders on household composition and the labor supply of elders and co-residing relatives, under a regression discontinuity design.

The authors do not find strong evidences of changes in the household composition due to the program. However the authors found reductions in the elders’ labor force participation, indicating that the program allow elders to retire. Moreover, the transfer yields a decrease in the labor force participation of co-residents, depending on their age. The authors also observe decreases in child labor.

Along with the cash comes context-dependent effects, showing there are many latent aspects of these transfers yet to be uncovered.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become widespread in poor countries as a way to alleviate current poverty and provide investments in human capital that improve families’ living conditions in the long-term. The first goal is accomplished when poor families receive money from governments on a monthly basis. The second goal is reached by conditioning the cash transfers on certain behaviors such as children's regular school attendance. However, these programs may also have impacts on time use decisions within beneficiary households, particularly with respect to time spent working. Using data from 2003, we measure the impact of the Brazilian Bolsa Escola CCT program on children's and parents’ labor status using the econometric framework of policy evaluation. Probit regressions and propensity score-matching methods show that this program reduces the probability of work for children aged 6–15, increases school enrollment, and increases mother and father participation in the labor force.

There are an estimated 190.7 million economically active children in the world today.¹ Most of these children are living in poor countries. Sixty-four percent live in Asia where nearly 1 in 5 children work. Sub-Saharan Africa's population is much smaller, but more than 1 in 4 children are economically active. These statistics do not include the hundreds of millions more that provide unpaid household services to their families.