To Regulate or not to Regulate? : Evaluating the Relationship between Prostitution Laws and Trafficking Flows

Yearly, hundreds of thousands of people are trafficked across borders, most often against their will or without their knowledge. Albeit having been a part of our history, our present and, sadly, probably our future, this form of modern slavery remains rather unexplored in quantitative research due to the lack of reliable data. By using a gravity model, this study investigates how trafficking is affected by prostitution laws. The strength of this paper lies in being able to disentangle the effect of prostitution laws on different types of trafficking and to look at both total trafficking flows as well as only cross-border flows. The results point towards there being a mostly negative correlation between legal prostitution and trafficking inflows, however, most results become insignificant when adding rule of law (a proxy for legal enforcement) to the specification. Allowing for third party involvement and solicitation might be correlated an increase in the inflow of victims exploited for sexual services, this is, however, statistically insignicant. For victims of forced labour, results are more equivocal, illustrating the potentially misleading conclusions that might be drawn in studies looking only at the effects of prostitution laws on total trafficking flows