Consumer boycott, household heterogeneity and child labour

Abstract

Consumer boycott campaigns against goods produced using child labour are becoming increasingly popular. Notwithstanding, there is no consensus on which are the effects of such type of activism on child labour. If some agreement is to be found in the recent economic literature, it is that the boycott does not reduce child labour. We contribute to this debate presenting a simple model which shows, instead, that there are conditions under which a consumer product boycott does reduce child labour. We consider a small country two-factor economy populated by heterogeneous households. The boycott affects both the adult and the child labour markets. The income distribution determines how these changes affect child labour at the household level. We derive the conditions under which the consumer boycott reduces child labour also for some of the households whose' income is - before the boycott - under the subsistence level.Consumer product boycott, child labour, household heterogeneity, income distribution