Dear do-gooders, you can't get rid of child labour just by banning it

Food for thought

I still run with the idea that child labour is something that disappears purely as a result of development. They have a chart in that paper showing child working hours and education across countries, Peru, India and Ethiopia. And given that that is the order of GDP per capita (for 2010, $6,000, $3,400 and $900) we'd not be surprised to find that Ethiopian children do many more work hours than Peruvian.

Looking again at Angus Maddison's figures, we can see that the very first attempts to curtail child labour in the UK were (in the 1850s, or so) when GDP per capita was at $2,300. India's attempt at a ban was when (yes, all figures inflation-adjusted) GDP was at $1,100. England reached $6,000 in 1940, where Peru is now, and people were still leaving school and going to work at 12 and 13 then, something which would today – under certain definitions – be described as child labour.

However, even if it does just disappear when incomes rise, still is there anything that we can do to speed this desirable process along?

And this is where I get to do the middle-aged man victory dance again.

Because there is something that can be done, yes. While it's the pointy heads above who explain why it works, it's people just messing about and doing things who first found out that it does work. And a very useful description of market processes is people messing about to find out what works, without any particular theoretical construct nor direction to go to do it.

The answer is: school dinners.

Now I'm always a bit wary of the God Botherers for Lord Alone knows there's been enough cruelties imposed in their name over the millennia.

I'm similarly wary of those of my own nominal tribe, the left footers, who claim to be inspired by mystical experiences. But still, to introduce you to Mary's Meals: for £12.20 a year they cook and serve a hot school dinner every school day to the poorest children of the world.

Well, OK, to just over one million of them at present. This isn't a panegyric to them but they do it at that cost by only actually paying for the food itself and it's mealie meal, or sorghum, or beans and rice. Essentially, a hot bowl of the local gruel, big enough that Oliver (Twist, and not mockney school dinner campaigner Jamie -Weekend Ed) doesn't ask for more, and that's it.

The cooking is done by the local parents, they must also plant trees to provide the firewood, and so on, the money buys the gruel.

No, a government programme to do the same would not work, not in these parts of the world. Money doled out from the centre just does not reach village schools.

But that bowl of gruel answers that economic question that parents are trying to answer. Should the child go to work to provide that gruel that will make them grow up big and strong enough to provide grandchildren? Or should the gamble of going to school be taken? And should one child have to work to provide gruel for those who do go to school?

If the porridge to do both is provided by turning up to school then obviously, more children will be going to school. Apparently, a 24 per cent rise in enrolment and a 10 per cent rise in attendance six months after such meals start being provided.

Now all of the above could be taken just as a story about child labour and food. But it isn't, not really.

It's in fact a story about how economics can be used to make the world a better place. OK, so there's this bad thing that we don't want to be happening. So, let's ban it! Amazingly, that doesn't solve our problem.

Because we've not understood the incentives that lead to people doing this bad thing. Only once we have understood those incentives can we work out how to change them and thus, possibly, stop that bad thing.

We might well find that people have got there with practical conclusions before we finish our pointy head ruminations because that's why markets are often better than planned systems: they explore the available policy and action space rather more quickly.

But that last bit is really only a small addition to the basic point.

Only if we understand why something is happening can we hope to correct it and this is going to be true of a whole host of problems: drug-taking, the gender pay gap, poverty itself and the existence of Simon Cowell.

Not all of them are solvable problems, Cowell certainly isn't. But only by understanding the incentives that propel people into them can we have a hope of changing those incentives and thus the behaviour. ®