Some notes on how land title affects child labour

South America

Brazil

Social Protection

Land entitlement

MJSB De Moura, RDL da Silveira Bueno

2010

de Moura, Mauricio Jose Serpa Barros, and Rodrigo De Losso da Silveira Bueno. “Some Notes on How Land Title Affects Child Labor.” Economia (Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia : 2000) 11.2 (2010): n. pag. Print.
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Secondary Data: N A.

2010

“Papel Passado” (“officially owned”)

2007-2014 (duration of the program)

The purpose of the program is to provide land titles to families living under illegal conditions – given its relevant economic and social role. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the impact of property rights on labor markets by analyzing household responses regarding child labor force participation to an exogenous change in formal ownership status in Brazil. It assesses the value to a squatter household of increases in tenure security associated with obtaining a property title in terms of hours of child labor supply.

Families that live under urban property informality in Osasco, São Paulo.

To isolate the causal role of ownership security, this study uses a natural experiment, by comparing two neighborhoods in the City of Osasco (a town with 650,000 people located in the São Paulo – Brazil metropolitan area) which are very similar to each other in many aspects. Osasco is part of the Papel Passado program and has 6,000 families living under urban property informality. One of them, Jardim Canaã, was fortunate to receive the titles in 2007, the other, Jardim DR, only will be part of the program schedule in 2012, and for that reason became the control group. Canaã and DR are not only official neighbors but there is no physical “borderline” between them since both are geographically united (if someone walks there, it is hard to identify the boundaries – even for the local households). Such an approach enables a comparison of households in a neighborhood reached by the program with households in a neighborhood not yet reached.

• Child labour (whether there is a child in the household helping with family income)
• Number of hours of work by the child

Difference-in-differences

Study design: The empirical analysis of household labor supply and income responses to changes in informal property rights relies on a data survey developed especially and exclusively for this paper in the City of Osasco, an important town in the São Paulo metropolitan area with a population of 654,000 people. The sample was chosen by first selecting 150 households (from the Canaã and DR) that have the closest birth dates (day and month). Each one of the three field researchers then got 50 names initially as first base. After reaching each of those households, they could go and pick the third and the fifth neighbor on the right-hand side of the house.
Sample: 326 families were randomly sampled.
Survey Instrument: The survey was based on a 39 questions questionnaire. The survey instrument, in many questions and methodologies, closely mirrors the IBGE Living Standards Measurement Survey (PNAD – Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra de Domicílios do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) in content, and therefore contains a variety of information on household and individual characteristics. In addition, there are six questions designed to provide information on the range of economic, social, and personal benefits associated with property formalization.

Titling results in a substantial decrease in child labor force participation for the families that received the title compared with the others.

Child Labour

Households

Local

Land entitlement results in a decrease in time spent in child labour. There has been a reduction in 3 hours of work per week for the targeted group and an increase of 2.8 hours of work for the control group.

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N. A.