Alcázar, L., Rendón, S. y  Wachtenheim, E. (2001). Trabajando y estudiando en América Latina rural: decisiones críticas de los adolescentes (Documento de Trabajo N° 3). Lima: Instituto Apoyo. Versión en inglés: Alcázar, L., Rendón, S. y  Wachtenheim, E. (2002). Working and studying in rural Latin America: critical decisions of adolescense (Research Network Working Paper R-469). BID.

This paper assesses the determinants of school attendance and work for rural adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 between 1997-1998 for a selected sample of Latin American countries. The present research is based on household surveys, applied to members of different ages and backgrounds, and designed to make inferences about the determinants of adolescents’ schooling and work decisions. These databases contain information that, given appropriate assumptions, can help construct the individual’s future decision-making process.

The study focuses on rural regions where adolescents have the lowest rates of full-time school attendance and the highest proportion of employed adolescents. These are also the areas where the poorest individuals in each country live, but where there is the greatest potential for improvement in living conditions if education is supported with public resources.

This paper finds that parental income and educational attainment, as well as household composition, are important determinants of the likelihood of school attendance and work in rural areas. This implies that better living conditions in rural areas of Latin America can have a considerable impact on increasing the educational attainment of their inhabitants and their offspring. In the next section, we present Jacoby’s (1994) model which, although not fully adaptable to the cross-sectional data used in this study, allows for a broad view of the problem under analysis. Section 3 describes the data used in the study. In Section 4, some statistical data showing the behaviour patterns of adolescents and their main characteristics are presented and analysed. Section 5 presents the methodology used in the estimations and discusses the results of the bivariate probit regressions on education and work decisions. Section 6 summarises the results obtained.