Trade and Child Labor: A General Equilibrium Analysis

This paper augments the existing literature on trade and child labor by exploring the effects of terms-of-trade changes in the context of a three-good general equilibrium model, in which one of the goods is a nontraded good. We find that, under quasi-linear preferences, the effect of the terms of trade on child labor depends critically on the pattern of substitutability (or complementarity) in the excess demand functions between the export good and the nontraded good. We extend the analysis to the case in which factors move freely between the three goods, as in a Heckscher-Ohlin-type framework. Finally, we show that a balanced budget policy of taxing the education of skilled families to subsidize the education of unskilled families must reduce child labor without any effect on aggregate welfare.