The Palestinian Economy. Theoretical and Practical Challenges

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Di Maio – Nandi
father is more prevalent for children attending school than for working children. Mother’s
education is lower for working children than for school participants. On the contrary, the
percentage of children with employed mother is notably higher among the working
children as compared to children attending school. As for household characteristics, it is
interesting to note that the number of male adult unemployed is lower for working
children than for school participants.
The last group of descriptives gives the district and year level break down of the
sample. Three districts – Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus – represent around half of the
sample. The schooling in Ramallah appears more than the sample proportion and
child labour in Nablus and Hebron appears less than the sample proportion. The last
block of numbers shows the composition of the sample in terms of year of survey. It
shows that considerable variation exists in the pool in terms of the year of survey and
children’s status.
Table 3 presents the distribution of the four states that are observable for a child,
namely both work and school, only work, only school, and neither. The first row shows
that 3% children are engaged in both work and school in West Bank. Less than 1% is
involved in only working and 1.7% in neither work nor school. A difference between the
10-12 years and 13-14 years groups is that the percentage of studying only is higher
among the younger group. The last block of the table shows the yearly pattern of these
four states for children. Looking at the studying only column, we note that schooling has
increased until 2002 to then decrease. While working only has remained almost constant
over the period, child labour (the sum of child working only and working and studying)
followed a U-shaped path over the years with an intermediate peak in 2003, and then
reaching the 8.3% in 2006. The percentage of children attending school has gradually
increased over time, from 96.4% in 2000 to 97.8% in 2006 but the percentage of studying
only is lower at the end of the period than it was before the Second Intifada began.
While the percentage of child labour in WB is not large, the high variation across
years suggests that some interesting mechanisms may be at work. In the following we
offer an explanation of these patterns based on the effects of changes in the number of
closure days imposed by Israel.