Gender and Competition between Child Economic or Non-Economic Labor and Schooling: Evidence from EPAM Mali

This paper uses the Understanding Children's Work (UCW) definition of child labor and data from EPAM Mali to highlight the gender difference in the competition between children's economic or non-economic labor and schooling. A Quadri-variate Probit estimation was first used to account for the interdependency between school and various kinds of child labor: household chores (HHC), market-oriented (MO) activities and non-market-oriented (NMO) activities. Then, a Clogit estimation was used to examine the incidence of time repartition among children within the household regarding the probability of schooling. Empirical results from EPAM Mali provide interesting findings, including differential gender socialization according to the gender of the offspring, gender bias in repartition of tasks and time, and competition between labor activities and schooling.