The voice of those absent - An empirical analysis of the impact of migration on child labor in Ecuador in 2017-2019

This paper aims to analyze whether migrant child laborers are more vulnerable within child labor than local children. We use data from the National Employment and Unemployment Survey of Ecuador (ENEMDU) of the National Institute of Statistics (INEC) from 2017 to 2019. We find a significant negative effect of internal migration on child labor for children under 18 years old through a province-level fixed effects model. Another vulnerability that we found is the negative effect on school enrollment. This may be a sign of two situations, the first segregation of migrant population, or an underreporting of child labor situation, as a result of the difficulty of tracking people in human mobility, what can make them invisible. Surprisingly, the hourly wage of migrant children is higher than local child laborers. Although we are unaware of studies that analyse this specific situation within children, we assume that the research that has been done for adult migrants, in which has been said that incentives are the explanation of this differentiation, it also explains the situation of children migrants. However, a more in-depth analysis of the issue is required.