Measuring and analyzing child labor : methodological issues

The paper argues that the current statistics on child labor (generally based on economically active children), are not a workable proxy for data on child labor, generating numbers of child laborers, and their gender composition, that do not represent the groups described by the international definition of child labor. This raises the question of reliable alternative ways of measuring children's activities, with the aim of analyzing the incidence of child labor. The paper addresses this, and proposes a child labor module that can be linked to surveys of labor force, or living conditions. It also proposes some ideas on how to analyze data on children's activities, and child labor.