ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that how food availability affected school enrollment rates in Malawi in 2010–2011. It also discusses how incomes and school dropout rates are associated just below or just above subsistence levels, respectively. Incomes, wages or household wealth play an important role in decisions on child labor and school enrollments. Among most of the research on child labor and income, there is an agreement on when child labor occurs: when a household income drops below its subsistence level. Parents, as rational decision makers struggling near the subsistence level, will have to determine whether they can increase current consumption by not sending kids to school and the expected future utility of children thanks to schooling. The chapter suggests that Christian children were more likely to be enrolled in school than those from any other religion, as all other religious group variables had negative coefficients.
