Labor Department Issues Report on International Child Labor

2/4/2004

From: Mike Biddle of the U.S. Department of Labor, 202-693-4650

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 -- The Labor Department has released a congressionally mandated report comparing military and basic education expenditures by governments in 73 developing countries for each year from 1990-2001. The report also assesses trends since 1989 related to the amount of funding that the World Bank and other international financial institutions have committed to these countries to prevent abusive child labor and improve access to basic education.

"This is the 13th Bureau of International Labor Affairs report on child labor. It represents an important element in the department's continuing efforts to increase awareness of effective methods for preventing or reducing the worst forms of child labor," said Arnold Levine, deputy under secretary of International Labor Affairs.

Advancing the Campaign Against Child Labor: The Resource Allocations of National Governments and International Financial Institutions finds that most of these countries dedicated a larger share of their central government expenditures to education than to the military. In contrast, the report indicates that the multilateral development banks the World Bank, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bankinvested a relatively small portion of their resources in these countries to basic education and child labor.

The Labor Department's International Child Labor Program reported data on education and military expenditures from statistics compiled by the World Bank's World Development Indicators 2002 and UNESCO's Institute for Statistics. In addition, the multilateral development banks provided data on their overall levels of funding to basic education and child labor programs.

The report is available on the Internet at: http://www2.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/Advancing3/ overview.htm. ------

ILAB conducts research on and formulates international economic, trade, immigration and labor policies and provides international technical assistance in support of U.S. foreign labor policy objectives.

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