Journal
POPULATION STUDIES-A JOURNAL OF DEMOGRAPHY
Volume 62, Issue 1, Pages 25-38Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00324720701788590
Keywords
child worth; value of children; women's work; Bangladesh; Mead Cain; Maya
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Funding
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING [R37AG011761, R01AG025488, R01AG025247] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG025247, R01 AG025247-01, R37 AG11761, R37 AG011761-05, R37 AG025488, R37 AG011761] Funding Source: Medline
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The economic contribution of children to their parents' households has long interested demographers because of its potential to influence fertility levels. Valuing children's labour in pre-industrial economies, however, is inherently difficult. The same is true of women's labour, a crucial component of any analysis of net production. Here we use Mead Cain's seminal study (Population and Development Review 3(3): 201-227, 1977) of children's economic contributions in a Bangladeshi village to illustrate these points. We combine Cain's data on landless women's and men's hours of work with data on the efficiency per hour of work from other pre-industrial settings (Mueller, Population and Development: The Search for Selective Interventions. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 98-153, 1976; Kramer, Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1998). When women's labour is incorporated, we find that the Bangladeshi children begin to produce as much as they consume by ages 10 (girls) or 11 (boys). Despite these productive contributions, neither women nor men 'pay' for their cumulative consumption until their early 20s. We believe our methods could be usefully applied in other contexts.
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