"Our recent research shows that children are less likely to work in countries with more international trade."

Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik find a negative association between a country's openness to trade, and the extent of child labor: Trade and child labour (VoxEU, July 19):

...The negative association between trade and child labour holds even when considering only poor countries’ trade with high-income countries. It also holds up for trade in unskilled-labour intensive products. Quite simply, child labour is less prevalent in countries that trade more because countries that trade more are richer, and children work less in richer countries....

Our findings from India mirror the findings from a recent study of ours in Vietnam. For a number of years, Vietnam used an export quota to suppress rice exports out of a concern for domestic food security. In the 1990s, Vietnam liberalised its rice trade and allowed rice farmers to take advantage of higher international prices. The rice sector boomed and living standards of rice producing households improved substantively. Despite greater employment opportunities, children in households that benefited from higher rice prices became much less likely to work. Altogether, it appears that roughly 1 million fewer children worked as a result of rising rice prices in Vietnam despite potentially more lucrative employment opportunities....