%0 Report
        %A Bell, Clive
%A Gersbach, Hans
        %T Child Labor and the Education of a Society
        %D 2001
        %8 2001 Aug
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 338
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp338
        %X We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work full-time and no human capital accumulation takes place, with continuous growth at an asymptotically steady rate as an alternative. We show that a society can escape from the poverty trap into a condition of continuous growth through a program of taxes and transfers. Temporary inequality is a necessary condition to escape in finite time, but long-run inequalities are avoidable provided sufficiently heavy, but temporary taxes can be imposed on the better-off. Programs aiming simply at high attendance rates in the present can be strongly non-optimal.
        %K growth and inequality
%K education
%K human capital
%K Child labor
%K redistributive policies
%K poverty traps