Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2012
Published In
Feminist Economics
Keywords
Trafficking, Migration, Gender
Abstract
Feminist work on global human trafficking has highlighted the conceptual difficulty of differentiating between trafficking and migration. This paper uses a cross-country UN dataset on human trafficking to empirically evaluate the socio-economic characteristics of high trafficking origin countries and compare them to patterns that have emerged in the literature on migration. In particular, we ask how and how much per capita income and gender inequality matter in shaping patterns of human trafficking origin. Ordinal logit regressions corrected for sample selection bias tell us that trafficking has an inverse-U shaped relationship with income per capita, and, controlling for income, is more likely in countries with higher shares of female to male income. These results suggest strong parallels between patterns of trafficking and migration and lead us to believe that trafficking cannot be addressed without addressing the drivers of migration.
DOI
10.1080/13545701.2012.680978
Rights
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
Recommended Citation
Rao, S.; and Presenti, C. (2012). Understanding Human Trafficking Origin: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis. Feminist Economics 18(2): 231-263. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2012.680978
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Feminist Economics on 8 August 2012, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13545701.2012.680978.