Education, Empowerment, and Exploitation: An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Gender Disparities and Digital Inclusion on Child Labor and Trafficking

Abstract

Child labor and child trafficking remain serious problems to sustainable development, especially in those areas that are highly structurally unequal and access to educational and technological facilities. Although earlier studies have mostly known about the economic factors of poverty, and the state of the labor market, relatively little focus has been given to the joint effect of gender inequalities in education and digital accessibility in making children susceptible to exploitative work practices. The paper is an empirical investigation of the impacts of female education, gender inequality, and digital inclusion on the results of child labor and trafficking based on a cross-country panel dataset of 2005-2022. The analysis uses the fixed effect and generalized method of moment’s estimators to study the direct and interaction impacts of gender differences as well as technological access in child exploitation indicators. The empirical results show that an increase in educational attainment of women is strongly linked to child labor participation decreases whereas the gender inequality increases the vulnerability of children to exploitative labor activities. Besides this, the phenomenon of digital inclusion also shows the mitigating effect as it minimizes the negative influence of gender differences on the outcomes of child labor, which implies that the better technological access is provided, the higher the level of education and information access. These findings confirm theoretical approaches based on human capital theory and the capability approach that emphasize the multidimensionality of vulnerability that is determined by social and technological inequalities. The research is an addition to the body of literature because it incorporates gender-based educational inequalities and digital inclusions in a single empirical model of child exploitation risks analysis. Policy wise, the results have highlighted the relevance of concerted efforts, which encourage both gendered education and equal opportunities in the growth of digital infrastructure to actually stem child labor and trafficking in the developing economies.