The law and economics of international sex slavery: prostitution laws and trafficking for sexual exploitation

Niklas Jakobsson and Andreas Kotsadam

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2013, vol. 35, issue 1, 87-107

Abstract: International trafficking in humans for sexual exploitation is an economic activity driven by profit motives. Laws regarding commercial sex influence the profitability of trafficking and may thus affect the inflow of trafficking to a country. Using two recent sources of European cross country data we show that trafficking of persons for commercial sexual exploitation (as proxied by the data sets we are using) is least prevalent in countries where prostitution is illegal, most prevalent in countries where prostitution is legalized, and in between in those countries where prostitution is legal but procuring illegal. Case studies of two countries (Norway and Sweden) that have criminalized buying sex support the possibility of a causal link from harsher prostitution laws to reduced trafficking. Although the data do not allow us to infer robust causal inference, the results suggest that criminalizing procuring, or going further and criminalizing buying and/or selling sex, may reduce the amount of trafficking to a country. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013

Keywords: Law and economics; Prostitution; Sexual exploitation; Sex slavery; Trafficking; F22; K14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10657-011-9232-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery: Prostitution Laws and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:35:y:2013:i:1:p:87-107

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-011-9232-0

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().