The Palestinian Economy. Theoretical and Practical Challenges

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The Effect of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Child Labour and School Attendance in West Bank Michele Di Maio and Tushar K. Nandi Abstract: This paper studies the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on child labour and school attendance of Palestinian children in West Bank. We use a novel dataset obtained by matching the quarterly Palestinian Labour Force Survey with a separate dataset on children (10-14 years). We consider the period between the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000) and 2006. We find that an increase in the number of days of closure of borders imposed by Israel increases child labour while it (marginally) reduces school attendance. We also provide evidence on different possible channels through which the closure of borders could have affected children’s status. Our results suggest that the conflict-induced worsening of the local labour market conditions is the most relevant channel in increasing child labour and reducing school attendance in West Bank. Keywords: Palestine, Israel, child labour, school attendance, conflict, closure days JEL Classification: J13, C35 University of Naples ‘Parthenope’, Italy. Corresponding author: Michele Di Maio, Department of Economic Studies, Faculty of Economics, University of Naples ‘Parthenope’, Naples, Italy. E-mail: michele.dimaio@uniparthenope.it. We would like to thank Ciro Avitabile, Marianna Belloc, Davide Castellani, Francesco Drago, Eric Edmonds, Tommaso Frattini, Ira Gang, Gianna Giannelli, Marco Manacorda, Sami Miaari, Patrizio Piraino, Tiziano Razzolini, Francesco Serti, Alberto Zazzaro, seminar participants at the University of Siena, University of Bethlehem, University of Perugia, University of Naples ‘Parthenope’, XXIII AIEL Conference, 2nd IZA Workshop on Child Labour in Developing Countries, 4th UCW Seminar on Child Labour, Education and Youth Employment for comments and suggestions. All errors are of course our own responsibility. Financial support from the FIRB Project “Creation of a Centre for Advanced Studies and Research in Cooperation and Development at Bethlehem University” is gratefully acknowledged. University of Siena, Italy
314 Di Maio – Nandi 1. Introduction The existence of child labour naturally raises a number of ethical, social and economic issues. While the dimension of the phenomenon is well known, there is still no consensus concerning its main determinants. This is not surprising considering that – as recent research indicates – child labour is a more varied, country and context-specific phenomenon than usually believed. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of child labour and school attendance examining the effect of a conflict on child’s status. Most of the literature on the economic impact of conflicts looks at their aggregate effects (Abadie and Gardeazabal 2003; Miguel and Roland 2006) while only recently microeconomic analysis are becoming available (see for instance Blatmann and Annan, 2010). The number of papers analysing the effect of a conflict on children is even smaller. Most of them focus on the effect of conflict on school attendance or achievement (see for instance Shemyakina, 2006; Akresh and de Walque, 2010) but they do not consider child labour. The Palestinian Territories are a unique setting to study the microeconomic effect of a conflict given their peculiar historical and economic features. Starting from the Six-Day War in 1967, West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been occupied by Israel. Since then, periods of conflict of different intensity followed one after another. After a decade of (relative) amelioration of the economic and political situation during the 90’s, the situation had dramatically worsened since the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada (also called second Intifada, September 2000). In response to re-surge of the conflict, Israel started increasingly imposing on Palestinians a number of mobility restrictions through different security measures: closures of borders, curfews and sieges. In particular, the military decision to impose the daily closure of borders made impossible for Palestinian workers employed in Israel to reach their workplaces. 1 Given that those represent a relevant share of Palestinian workers, closures turned out to strongly affect the whole Palestinian economy. In this paper we analyze the effect of closures on child labour and school attendance of Palestinian children 10-14 in West Bank between the beginning of the Second Intifada and the end of 2006. There are different reasons for which the conflict may affect 1 Closure consists of banning the movement of labour and goods between the Occupied Territories and Israel, as well as between, and within, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
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The Palestinian Economy. Theoretical and Practical Challenges

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