can you please explain what do you mean for financial inclusion? What is your unit of analysis?

By Financial Inclusion I mean unrestrained access to formal sources of finance. I am interested in understanding the impact of financial inclusion (or in other words access to finance) on the child labour.

The explanatory variables can be:  Parents of child workers - what is the extent of access they have to financial services?

1)  Does the mother have a bank account in her name?

If so, minimum balance, say, over one year

Number of transactions (deposits, withdrawals)

2) Has the mother taken a loan for business purposes (agri, shop, etc)

Has she repaid the loan as per schedule (yes - fully, mostly - low overdues, high overdues, default)

3) Has the mother/father accessed insurance services related to economic activity?

Crop insurance, asset insurance, etc.

4) Has the mother accessed insurance services for personal safety security?

Life, health, accident?

Dear Audil

Child labor is an unfortunate result of a myriad of adverse social and economic conditions having vicious circles of causality upon the persons and the households. If child labor is taken to mean 'a compulsion to work or a work for wages done by the children below a certain age' then there must be causative variables behind this compulsion to work. The basic question is whether an incidence of financial inclusion leads to household poverty removal, income regularity, credit availability, supportive to child schooling, nutrition and so on. Secondarily, autonomously existing financial inclusion measured by the number of bank accounts, insurances etc. may itself be the evidence as well as the result of a better social and economic status meaning thereby a disincentive for child labor in the household.

So an obvious conclusion occurs that if the financial inclusion is already associated with a reasonable economic well-being then certainly it will be positively correlated with child schooling and negatively with child labor. However, when the reverse is true, it is not the inclusion as such but the nature and the enabling and capability building character of the inclusion which can be supposed to be negatively associated with child labor and other abuses of childhood occurring due to lack of household capabilities and entitlements.

In addition to Anuradha's well thought out suasion, I would like to make a suggestion to try

(a) a time series data,

(b) segmented across social and economic categorization, and

(c) correlated with the incidence of schooling and child labor among the sample households.

Thanks Audil. 

Thanks Anuradha,, Thanks Mohammad...

Thanks for such insightful comments... This is the kind of suggestions which can help me move forward to achieve the objective of this study,,,

Thanks Audil

Go ahead and get good results.