Counting women's labour: A reanalysis of children's net production using Cain's data from a Bangladeshi village

Abstract

The economic contribution of children to their parents’ households has long interested demographers because of its potential to influence fertility levels. Valuing children’s labour in pre-industrial economies, however, is inherently difficult. The same is true of women’s labour, a crucial component to any analysis of net production. Here we use Mead Cain’s seminal (1977) study of children’s economic contributions in a Bangladeshi village to illustrate these points. We combine Cain’s data on landless women’s and men’s hours of work with data on the efficiency per hour of work from other pre-industrial settings (Mueller 1976; Kramer 1998). When women’s labour is incorporated, we find that the Bangladeshi children begin to produce as much as they consume by ages ten (girls) or eleven (boys). Despite these productive contributions, neither women nor men “pay” for their cumulative consumption until their early twenties. We believe these methods could be usefully applied in other contexts.