The ILO definition of the worst forms of child labour includes work that is likely to jeopardise health and

safety. Effective targeting of those child work activities most damaging to health requires both
conceptual understanding and empirical evidence of the interactions between child labour and health.
The aim of the paper is to review the current state of such knowledge, which is central to the design of
policies that, whilst protecting children from work activities most damaging to their health, do not
jeopardise the subsistence livelihood of their families. The relationships between child labour and health
are complex. They can be direct and indirect, static and dynamic, positive and negative, causal and
spurious. The diversity of potential relationships makes their empirical disentanglement a difficult
exercise. A conceptual framework of analysis is required and important issues of measurement and of
estimation must be given careful consideration.

Children at work: Health and safety risks:

This provides an approach to the protection of children through the development of a programme on
occupational safety and health specifically addressed to working children. It illustrates how this can be
done within a framework of a national policy aimed at the elimination of child labour. This new edition
takes account of the provisions of the ILO's Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182),
covering work that is likely to harm the health, safety and morals of children, and presents updated
information on health and safety risks, and current studies including examples of successful responses.
As with the previous edition, it also includes procedures to identify hazardous working conditions, and
offers advice on developing improved methods and instruments to assess and protect the health of
working children. It supplies basic information and guidance for the general reader, as well as valuable
reference material for physicians and others on possible child-related occupational diseases.

Eliminating hazardous child labour:

Article 4 requires each country to prepare its own list of what constitutes hazardous work. Because
economies, industries, customs, and production processes differ from place to place, the types of
hazardous work in which children are engaged will differ as well, as will the best ways of addressing the
problem. This guide offers suggestions on the process of making this list. This process of identifying
hazardous child work is critically important. Without the hazardous work list it is difficult to know where
and on what to concentrate action to eliminate the worst forms of child labour. The process takes some
time and should not be short-changed. All the more reason for those ratified countries that have not yet
begun this process to get started without delay.

Health effects of childrenís work: Evidence from Vietnam*:

whether work in childhood impacts on health. We distinguish between urban and rural settings and
focus on agricultural work, which is the dominant form of child work worldwide. We use a particularly
rich two-wave panel data set ñ the 1993 and 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys. The panel nature
of the data and the availability of good instruments, makes it possible to correct for potential
endogeneity arising from both unobservable heterogeneity and simultaneity. Instruments take the form
of small area labour market and education conditions obtained from community surveys matched to
individual records. We use two indicators of health ñ reported illness/injury and the body mass index.
Both contemporaneous and longer-term effects of child work on health are examined. A variety of
estimators and identification strategies are employed to deal with endogeneity. There is strong evidence
of unobservable heterogeneity bias but little indication of simultaneity bias. In rural areas, we find no
evidence of a contemporaneous impact of child work on health. However, there is evidence that work
undertaken in rural settings during childhood raises the risk of illness five years later. In urban areas,
there is some evidence that child work has a contemporaneous negative impact on health.