These are not just fantastic numbers in their own right, but they also say something interesting about child labour itself. It seems to suggest that parents put their children to work not to maximize income, but because they have no alternative. Rapidly increasing rice exports in the 1990s meant that the value of Vietnamese children’s potential work increased, so if parents simply wanted more resources, they would have put their children to work. Instead, the number of child labourers declined by several million in just a few years. This indicates that children only work because their families
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