the Vietnam Young Lives Dataset in 2006 and 2009. Heckman’s selection model is employed to reduce the problem of the truncated sample as well as bias problems.
Approaching the two-step process of the household decisions relating child labor, the paper finds that health shocks create the negative impact on the child labor participation (e.g. increasing the probability of the child labor participation) but not find the significant effect on the child work hour. It is noted that in the participation function, the magnitude of the impact of health shocks is cushioned by the impact of the asset holding, the probability of the child labor participation creases to 30,4% from the initial point of 30%.
Besides, asset holdings play an important role in Vietnam households to cope with health shocks, are significant statistically both the functions. In the participation estimate, asset holdings reduce the probability of the child labor participation to 27.9% and 24.6% from the initial level of 30% if households do not experience health shocks and occurring health shocks respectively. It takes into account that asset holdings present a buffering effect on health shocks in this function but not in that of the child work hour. In the child work hour function, when other variables do not change, when the value of asset is double, the child work hour drops to 16 hour per day.
Both households residing in the rural area and belonging to poor households show the negative impact on the child labor participation and the child work hour, meaning increase child labor. Additionally, the father plays a primary role in the household decision-making, including decisions relating to child labor. It takes into account that child labor is really different among the different region where Mekong River Delta presents the lowest level for child labor when households meet health shocks. In the other words, the probabilities of the child labor participation for children living in other regions are larger than the base region Mekong River Delta.
The results of the study can propose to some directions on the development policy.
Because health shocks increase child labor, especially for children who live in the rural and poor households where there are the existence of the potential low-skill labor as well as low-income. Besides, the asset plays an important role to control the negative impacts of health shocks on child labor, then the household with low asset holdings will face
more difficulties than others. Therefore, the policy that support the program to reducing the
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poverty should be noticed. In the other side, improving the ability to approach the public health service as well as providing the health insurance package can help households covering the negative consequence of health shocks. From that, the pressure of health shocks on households might be reduce and they would have more the ability to protect their children from risks.
Furthermore, because of the important role of the father in Vietnam households, the program to improve the reveal of the father about the child development can help reducing the child labor. Additionally, the older child in the Vietnam have to spend more time for work, it seems slightly naturally. Noted that they also face more pressure from studying where there are higher requirements. It means that parents should spend more their concerns the balance between their children’s education and work.
It should be noted that this paper can also contain several limitations regarding the dataset, choosing variables as well as research scope. Due to the lack of continuous variables in dataset, the study uses a slightly large dummy. Besides, the percentage of member death in the sample is very small, and then, the study ignores to discuss the impact of health shocks with several dimensions, only using a general definition. Thus, this is noted that the paper can dive into with several dimensions for both subjects to consider issues with multi-direction. A further analysis is to research to explore more detail with specific types of health shocks as well as child labor would be to consider.
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APPENDIX
Figure A1: Distribution of children from 5-17 years old participating in Economic Activities (EA) in Vietnam (2012)
Source: Viet Nam National Child Labour Survey (2012)