Does increased international trade promote

Does increased international trade promote child labor?

Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik say no (or more accurately, that the evidence isn't there), in this National Bureau of Economic Research paper "International Trade and Child Labor: Cross-Country Evidence". According to the abstract:

"We explore the relationship between greater exposure to trade (as measured by openness) and child labor in a cross country setting. Our methodology accounts for the fact that trade flows are endogenous to child labor (and labor standards more generally) by examining the relationship between child labor and variation in trade based on geography.

We find that countries that trade more have less child labor. At the cross-country means, the data suggest an openness elasticity of child labor of -0.7. [so as their measure of openness to trade increases by 1%, their measure of child labor is decreasing by 0.7% - Ben] For low-income countries, the elasticity of child labor with respect to trade with high income countries is -0.9. However, these relationships appear to be largely attributable to the positive association between trade and income. When we control for the endogeneity of trade and for cross-country income differences, the openness elasticity of child labor at cross-country means is much smaller (-0.1) and statistically insignificant.

We consistently find a negative but statistically insignificant association between openness and child labor conditional on cross-country income differences when we split the sample into different country groups, consider only trade between high and low income countries, or focus on exports of unskilled-labor intensive products from low income countries.

Thus, the cross-country data do not substantiate assertions that trade per se plays a significant role in perpetuating the high levels of child labor that pervade low-income countries."

I've broken this up into paragraphs for easier reading. This is NBER Working Paper #w10317, February 2004.

Comments

[Jemstom]

Ever since man led a life of food gatherer while living together in tribes and clans we see children’s participation to lend their mothers a helping hand. Children’s help was necessary and expected because it was not enough for just the father to assemble food. With further development in the society when market-related jobs became common, children were expected to work, earn money, and give their earnings to their parents to buy food and shelter. Until merely a short time ago, the practice of parents giving children to those to whom they were indebted for the purpose of labor, or indentured service, was common.