Quality of School Service Delivery, Human Capital, and Child Labor: Empirical Evidence from Indonesia

The contribution of this research is analyzing the effect of the quality of primary and secondary school service delivery on child labor practices, taking Indonesia as a case study. It is a non-trivial issue for a country like Indonesia, which achieved significant economic progress, but still faced the topic of child labor. The research used data of approximately 55,000 children sampled in the 2018 Indonesian Labor Force Survey (Sakernas), and primary and secondary school accreditation data of Indonesia. Regarding a probit regression model, this paper found that better quality of school service delivery reduces the chance of child labor. Robust to alternate specifications, the findings of this study confirm the hypothesis that quality of school service delivery influences the decision of Indonesian households to send their children to work. It is also found that the education level of the household head decreases the chance of child labor. The implication of this result is, improvement in the quality of school service delivery can serve as an important tool to eliminate child labor. For policy, the government should direct more technical support, and resources to increase the quality of school service delivery, especially in rural and disadvantaged areas. In addition to fulfilling  the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target 8.7 on eliminating child labor, this policy is aligned with achieving SDGs target number 10; reducing inequality within a country.