The Hidden Cost of Forced Child Labor

In their blog "Why Nations Fail," Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson highlight one of the hidden costs of large scale forced child labor in Uzbekistan: the decline in educational achievement of students forced to spend weeks and sometimes months harvesting cotton rather than attending school.

"This type of coercion is actually all too common," Acemoglu and Robinson conclude, "and is indicative of the sorts of institutions that not only fail to impart human capital to children, but are at the root of much more widespread economic and social failure. And it is not in place by accident or as an inevitable remnant of some past practices..."