Social Globalization and Child Labor: A Cross‐country Analysis

Abstract

While much of the research on child labor focuses on household level factors, macroeconomic factors, such as globalization, have gained increasing attention. This paper contributes to the literature on the role of globalization in child labor by examining a specific aspect of globalization, namely social globalization. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that social globalization does have a significant negative impact on the average incidence of child labor in the cross‐country sample of developing countries. This contrasts with the existing literature on economic globalization and child labor, where, in many cases, no significant effect is found.