ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the feminist economics literature on sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation (trafficking). It argues that feminist economics literature on sex work and trafficking can be broadly ascribed to the postmodern strand. Influential feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s have conceptualized prostitution as an implicit or explicit contract where money is exchanged for a right over the person. Two basic tenets of feminist economics on sex work and trafficking are that both phenomena are gendered rather than biologically determined, and the economic position of sex workers is socially constructed. Support for de-criminalization policies are both nuanced and evolving among feminist economists: nuanced because market segmentation implies that the same policy provision can have different and even opposite effects in different segments; evolving because we are still learning from the experience of countries that have opted in favor of de-criminalization or criminalization over the past decades.
